Posted inScience

Behold the early universe as revealed by the Webb Space Telescope

Science rocks! The Hubble Space Telescope was a scientific marvel. Now it has been surpassed by the James Webb Space Telescope, whose first images were released by NASA a few days ago.  Check out the images on the NASA web site. My favorite is this one. Not because it is the most beautiful or most dramatic. I love it because it reveals how the universe appeared less than a billion years after the big bang set things in motion about 13.8 billion years ago. This is part of how NASA described the image. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has delivered…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas

An entertaining message about RSSB from Dibloggenes

I love to get emails from people who are having doubts about the religious organization I belonged to for 35 years, Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB). When a message is written in an entertaining fashion, I doubly love that email. Here's what someone who wants to be known as Dibloggenes had to say to me, along with my response. For those who aren't familiar with some terms in the message, Gurinder Singh Dhillon is the current RSSB guru who has been in a lot of controversy. Tara was a frequent commenter on this blog some years back who was a…
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Posted inComments Miscellaneous

Back to basics: our faithless faith and commenting policies

It never hurts to return to the basics. So in this easy-to-write post I'm going to copy in one of the first posts I wrote after I started this blog in 2004, "Our Creedless Creed," plus this blog's commenting policies. Regarding the latter, note that comments are supposed to stick to the subject matter of a post. I'm flexible about this, but today two commenters (UM and Nimfa) engaged in an almost entirely irrelevant series of eleven chat comments on a post about the RSSB guru's authoritarianism.  That's unacceptable. As you can read in the commenting policies, off-topic comment conversations…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas

Examples of RSSB guru’s authoritarianism

Since there's currently some comment discussion about whether the guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) is an authoritarian who believes he can do whatever he wants, being considered God in Human Form by devotees, here's links to some blog posts I've written about questionable activities during the reign of Gurinder Singh Dhillon, the current RSSB guru. There's more posts, but this is a good sample. (I keep adding to the list as I think of additional blog posts I've written over the years that pertain to this subject.) Malvinder's criminal complaint casts light on RSSB guru's role in financial…
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Posted inBooks Science

Two big ideas about the cosmos and the self

As I frequently say here on the Church of the Churchless, and will undoubtedly be saying again and again, religions are notable for basically being stuck in the Dark Ages, with fresh theologies being very rare, while science and reason continually make strides in casting more light upon the unknown. Recently I've been blogging about a couple of books that I've finished reading, and want to get off my active-reading bookshelf to make room for new titles. So here's what probably are my final observations about Life is Simple: How Occam's Razor Set Science Free and Shapes the Universe and…
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Posted inSpiritual practice/meditation

A compassionate perspective on Sant Mat and the spiritual pursuit

Here's a guest blog post from someone who writes well, thinks clearly, and has an interesting perspective on the spiritual pursuit. Kinder and gentler than my own attitude toward cults and religions. I added a couple of links to the person's post. Dear Brian, I was searching the internet for Sant Mat history and I found your blog. As I was reading it, back and forth, there have been quite a few entries of people over the years, I felt glad that I found some answers that clarified my own thinking. So then I wanted to , you know, say…
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Posted inGod Humor

How to reply to 14 crazy things religious believers say

Since it's July 4, Independence Day, here in the United States, I thought I'd mark the occasion by composing 14 replies to some crazy stuff religious believers might say. This is in line with my commitment to spiritual independence. And also because, as I said in a post on my HinesSight blog, I'm not feeling good about our political independence these days. Enjoy... If someone says, God must exist eternally, because the cosmos couldn't create itself, reply: If nothing created an eternal God, then nothing could have created an eternal cosmos, the difference being that the cosmos clearly is real,…
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Posted inOpen Threads

Open Thread 43 (free speech for comments)

Here's a new Open Thread. Remember, off-topic comments should go in an Open Thread.  If you don't see a recent comment, or comments, posted, it might be because you've failed to follow the above rule. Keep to the subject of a blog post if you leave a comment on it. And if you want to use this blog as a "chat room," do that in an open thread. As noted before, it's good to have comments in a regular blog post related to its subject, and it's also good to have a place where almost anything goes in regard to sharing ideas, feelings, experiences, and such.…
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Posted inChristianity/Jesus God

How the heck could God create humans in her own image?

Today I was planning to write about another subject, but after responding to a commenter who embraces the idea that humans are made in the image of God (who I prefer to view as a nonexistent female, hence this blog post title), I went with that notion. I'm not sure why Andrew Stephens shared the links in his comment. I'm assuming he uses Musk and Harari as examples of godless secularists, which probably is accurate. Personally, I admire both of these men, being a happy user of Musk's groundbreaking Starlink satellite internet system and having enjoyed each of Harari's brilliantly…
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Posted inBooks Taoism/Tai Chi

Self comes and goes in our lives, though we don’t have one

"Self" and "soul" are closely related. Both words point to the notion of something within us, or that is us, which stands apart from the world in a transcendent sense. What I just wrote points to the absurdity of believing that it is possible or necessary to cultivate our self or soul.  If self/soul is something within us, then it isn't actually a core reality, since the us it is within encompasses  a lesser self/soul. If self/soul is us, we're already that which we are, so nothing needs to be done. By contrast Buddhism and Taoism, along with modern neuroscience…
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Posted inFundamentalism God

Delusion of imagining you’re an instrument of the divine will

Here's a right-on illustration by L.K. Hanson. I saw this on a Facebook post yesterday. The person who shared it said that Hanson's work appears in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. When people talk about being a special instrument of the divine will, I'm reminded of Garrison Keillor's description of his fictional Minnesota small town, Lake Wobegon, “where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.” In the world of fundamentalist religion, all the believers are especially attuned to God's will. Which can't be, given how different religions typically are from each other.…
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Posted inBooks Buddhism

Awareness doesn’t require a subject who is aware

A few days ago I wrote about how there's no need to find your self, because you don't have one. That's the central message of Jay Garfield's book, "Losing Ourselves: Learning to Live Without a Self." Sounds good to me. One of my favorite humorous pieces from The Onion is Search For Self Called Off After 38 Years. Here's how it starts off. CHICAGO—The longtime search for self conducted by area man Andrew Speth was called off this week, the 38-year-old said Monday. "I always thought that if I kept searching and exploring, I'd discover who I truly was," said…
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Posted inBooks Buddhism Taoism/Tai Chi

Relax: no need to find your self, because you don’t have one

I've become a fan of easygoing approaches to spirituality. That's one reason I enjoy Taoism so much. The Taoists I've known don't look upon life very seriously. Neither do many Buddhists. A common denominator of Taoism and Buddhism is that neither philosophy assumes that we have a self or soul. Meaning, they're selfless.  This takes the pressure off of goals such as self-realization, self-awareness, knowing one's self, and so on. Those sorts of practices still can be pursued, but with the understanding that there's no such thing as an unchanging self or soul lurking within us. Just substitute "person" for…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories Radha Soami Satsang Beas Spiritual practice/meditation

I respond to a B.S. comment about my 52 years of meditation

UPDATE: Spence Tepper has apologized to me for his ridiculous attempt to claim that my 35 years of daily meditation while a member of Radha Soami Satsang Beas, usually for several hours a day, amounted to "nothing." Good for Spence. He recognized how wrong he was. Hopefully from now on he will realize that my approach to meditation is the wise one: don't challenge someone's personal experience in meditation, but DO challenge any claim that this experience proves the existence of a supernatural realm beyond the physical. Spence doesn't like my skepticism toward his brand of religious fundamentalism. I've pointed out…
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Posted inBooks Science

Science delivers accurate predictions. Religion doesn’t.

Yay, me! I finally finished reading Johnjoe McFadden's book, "Life is Simple: How Occam's Razor Set Science Free and Shapes the Universe."  It took me longer than expected, because I didn't find McFadden's lengthy descriptions of the life and times of historical figures in science, starting with the ancient Greeks, to be all that interesting. I guess he felt he needed to do that in order to buttress his case for how science came to embrace the adage of William of Occam: "Entities should not be multiplied without necessity." This doesn't mean that the world is simple, just that in…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas

Cognitive dissonance is alive and well in commenters on this blog

It's amusing to observe how much work some religious believers who comment on my blog posts go to in defending an obvious fact.  A recent example is me stating in several blog posts that the notion of the Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) guru being God in Human Form, or GIHF, is a central RSSB tenet. How can you have a "Path of the Saints" without a saint? The whole rationale behind the RSSB teachings is that God manifests in the form of a Perfect Living Master (PLM) to guide souls back to Him, because otherwise God remains an unseen,…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas

RSSB teachings: “The perfect Master is the Lord in human flesh”

Recently I wrote two blog posts about the notion of a guru being God in Human Form. First, I said that this makes no sense. Then I said that Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) does teach that the RSSB guru is God in Human Form.  Since some regular commenters on this blog are familiar with the RSSB teachings, I was surprised with the pushback that second post got. Even though I'd provided quotes from two previous RSSB gurus saying that, indeed, the RSSB guru is God in Human Form, for some reason this obvious fact was being denied by a…
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Posted inFundamentalism

Finale of “Under the Banner of Heaven” shows absurdity of religion

Back in May I wrote about a streaming series on Hulu, "Under the Banner of Heaven." In the title of that post I called it a compelling story of religion gone bad.  The series is based on a true story, the murder of a young woman and her baby at the hands of extremely fundamentalist Mormons. Last night my wife and I watched the final episode. It tied things together nicely, and was the most philosophical of any episode in how the characters talked about atheism and religious belief. Detective Jeb Pyre, a devout Mormon white guy, has a Native…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas

Sometimes the RSSB guru sounds like he doesn’t believe the RSSB teachings

Sort of weirdly, in a recent post, "RSSB does teach that the guru is God in Human Form," atheist me was arguing that the teachings of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), my spiritual home for 35 years, say that the RSBB guru is God's right hand man (no female gurus yet) while some current members of RSSB were arguing the opposite -- that the guru is just a regular human like everybody else. This perplexed me for a while.  Then I came up with a theory. Being an ancient 73 years old, I was initiated into RSSB way back in…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas

The mystery of Julian Johnson’s death at the Dera in 1939

Recently I heard from someone who asked if I had read a book about the death of Dr. Julian Johnson. Johnson wrote "The Path of the Masters," a book about the philosophy of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), an India-based spiritual organization headed up by a guru. I told the person that I wasn't familiar with the book about Johnson's death and asked if the person could summarize it. With their permission, here's what I received. I did some minor editing and added a few links. Dear Brian, The extremely short version is that the Dera tried to cover up…
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