Posted inMeaning of life

Let’s agree: life is difficult

With so many divisions in the world -- political, religious, nationalistic, plus many others -- sometimes it seems like there's nothing all of us can agree on. I suggest this as a foundation for finding common ground: life is difficult.  Not all of the time. Much of the time. And for some, most of the time. The degree of difficulty varies for each person, sort of akin to a gymnastics routine where a score is based in part on the degree of difficulty of the various moves. Yet no matter who we are or what circumstances we find ourselves in,…
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Posted inBooks Delusions Reality

Presumptions are necessary for reasoning to work

Almost everybody who has had a child -- that includes me -- knows how annoying it can be when they learn how to make "Why?" into a way to drive a parent crazy. You need to turn the TV off and go to bed.Why?Because it's late and you need to go to school tomorrow.Why do I need to go to school?So you can learn things.Why should I learn things? And so it goes, until the parent gets fed up and ends the discussion with "Because I said so! Go brush your teeth!" Andy Norman uses this sort of Why? reasoning…
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Posted inBooks Religions

How religions disable our reasoning practices

Here's a marvelous excerpt from Andy Norman's book, "Mental Immunity: Infectious Ideas, Mind-Parasites, and the Search for a Better Way to Think."  I read it this morning and realized it's a terrific way to explain what's wrong with the irrationality of religion. Norman imagines that someone wants to figure out how to best undermine human reasoning that enables us to distinguish truth from falsehoods, what's real from what's illusory.  As you'll read below, what results is... (no big surprise) religion.  Imagine yourself part of a team charged with stress-testing civilization's all-important reasoning practices. The team has an initial meeting, and the…
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Posted inBooks Religions

Religious beliefs can be false, yet useful

My wife turned me on to Andy Norman's book, "Mental Immunity: Infectious Ideas, Mind-Parasites, and the Search for a Better Way to Think." She's listening to it via the audiobook. I'm reading the print edition. The Covid pandemic has taught us all a lot about immunity against viruses. Vaccines help us fight off a Covid infection by strengthening our defenses against the viral invader. Likewise, Norman argues, minds are prone to being infected by bad ideas.  Unfortunately, there is no way to get a shot that wards off bad ideas. Instead, his book describes ways we can protect our mind…
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Posted inCoronavirus

I’m tired of our nation’s 9/11 obsession

Over on my Salem Political Snark blog, I just finished "On 9/11, let's remember the 659,556 Covid deaths."  Here's how I introduced that post on Facebook. I have to be honest. I'm tired of our nation's obsession with 9/11. Yes, it was a tragedy. But 9/11 pales in comparison to the tragedy of the Covid pandemic, which has killed 220 times as many people than died on 9/11. Radical Islam was responsible for 2,996 deaths. Radical Trumpism is responsible for the hundreds of thousands of Covid deaths that experts say could have been prevented. I refuse to mourn the deaths…
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Posted inConsciousness Science

Quantum theory doesn’t say consciousness creates reality

I'm no quantum physicist. That option closed down for me early on, when I was kicked out of my high school physics class because I was paying more attention to my girlfriend sitting behind me than to whatever the teacher was saying.  But I've made up for that by reading lots of books about quantum theory, many of them in the course of researching my first book about the connection between ancient mysticism and the new physics, "God's Whisper, Creation's Thunder" -- which I got back in print via a rewrite that took out the preachy parts.  I no longer…
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Posted inAtheism God

I’m an atheist who has a personal relationship with God

The title of this blog post is surprising, right? How is it possible for an atheist to have a personal relationship with God? Answer: it's easy. I simply define "God" a lot differently than religious believers do. As described in Atheists should redefine "God" as all that exists, I look upon God as being synonymous with reality, or existence. So I find God awe-inspiring, mysterious, impossible to fathom.  After all, the greatest mystery -- one which almost certainly never will be unraveled by humans -- is that existence exists. Or as the mystery often is described, why is there something rather…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories

Life is uncertain

Might as well share a post I just wrote for my HinesSight blog. Here's how I introduced it on Facebook. l'm feeling kind of philosophical. (OK, a common feeling fof me.) Decided to write about how life only is predictable when looking backward, and not even then, really, because the events that seemed to cause our life to turn out a certain way could easily have been different. I use how my wife and I met as an example of how uncertain life can be.   https://hinesblog.com/2021/09/life-is-only-predictable-looking-backward/
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Posted inAtheism God

Atheists should redefine “God” as all that exists

The word "God" has a strong hold on people. So strong, even atheists sometimes use it, as in "God damn it!" Or "God bless you" after a sneeze.  So I've come to believe that we atheists need to appropriate "God" for our own purpose -- living without superstition, supernatural fantasy, and blind faith.  There's nothing wrong with that word, just as there's nothing wrong with any word. A word is simply made up of letters. The meaning those letters represent is entirely in the hands of humans. Unlike "gravity," say, there is no objective reality that the usual meaning of…
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Posted inAwareness

Better self-awareness comes from sharing our self with others

For many years I wrongly thought that the way to "know myself" was to engage in several hours a day of solitary meditation. Sure, I did learn some things about myself in this way and developed a lot of discipline by meditating every morning whether or not I felt like it. Now, though, I've come to realize that it is easy to fool ourselves when the only conversation we're having is within our own mind -- I talking to me; us speaking to ourself; one part of our psyche conversing with another part. As noted in my previous post about…
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Posted inBooks Science

Metacognition is key to knowing yourself

I'm about halfway through reading Stephen Fleming's Know Thyself: The Science of Self-Awareness. Basic concepts of the book are mind reading, in the sense of inferring what is in someone else's mind, and metacognition, literally thinking about our thinking, or more broadly, being aware of ourself.  Since Fleming, a British neuroscientist, cites many research studies in his book, reading it can take some effort. However, Fleming is a good writer, and frequently uses examples from everyday life, so on the whole I'm liking it a lot.  The title, Know Thyself, points toward a fact I've marveled at for a long…
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Posted inBuddhism Free will Reality

“Moon” movie points to shocking non-supernatural realization

A year or so ago I watched "Moon" via Netflix. I guess at this point I need to enter an obligatory spoiler alert, in case anyone hasn't seen this 2009 movie and thinks they might want to see it without knowing a crucial plot element. This was an intriguing movie, though not super-entertaining. The acting was good, but not exceptional. What I distinctly remember was a shocking twist. There Sam Bell (played by Sam Rockwell) is, at a base on the moon where a mining operation is taking place. He's looking forward to returning home after a three-year solitary tour…
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Posted inFundamentalism Politics

Mostly people we disagree with are well-meaning

Ooh, nice! I like it!  That was the voice that speaks inside my head after I'd written the final two sentences in a Facebook message. Mostly people we disagree with are well-meaning. They just find meaning in their lives in a different fashion than we do. The woman I was communicating with responded with a pleasing "Well said!" My sentiment exactly.  I said what I did in regard to a religious group, Salem Awakening, that's been having outdoor services in a public park on the riverfront. Some people distrust Salem Awakening because they have organized protests against Planned Parenthood in…
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Posted inPolitics Religions

Excessive wokeness is akin to extreme religiosity

Yesterday I wrote a post on my Salem Political Snark blog, "I get cited by Salem's Woke Police." Here I'll explore the connection between wokeness and religiosity. Since many people who visit this blog don't live in the United States, woke is a word that means "alert to racial or social discrimination and injustice." That sounds like a good thing, which usually it is. But as the saying goes, you can have too much of a good thing. About three weeks ago I helped start a new Facebook group here in Salem, Oregon. The instigator was a young woman who…
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Posted inBooks Meaning of life

“The Web of Meaning” — great book about finding our place in the universe

I've finished The Web of Meaning, by Jeremy Lent, a book with the subtitle, "Integrating Science and Traditional Wisdom to Find Our Place in the Universe." It's a lengthy book, 382 pages, that I enjoyed. My first post about it was "Marvelous mystery lies in the complexity of the world." Lent wrote a related previous book, The Patterning Instinct. Both books discuss Eastern and Western religions in a well-informed manner. In 2017 I talked about The Patterning Instinct in "Indian and Greek thought are both dualistic. Chinese thought isn't." In these passages Lent explains how ancient India embraced a form…
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Posted inSpiritual practice/meditation

“There is no path” — poet Antonio Machado

For a long time I believed in a path. A path back to God. The religious group I belonged to for 35 years, Radha Soami Satsang Beas, taught there was such a path. One of their books was called "Path of the Masters." Since I no longer accept that such a path exists, I like this poem by Antonio Machado. There are various translations from the Spanish. I've shared several. Wanderer, your footprints arethe path, and nothing else;wanderer, there is no path,the path is made by walking.Walking makes the path,and on glancing backone sees the paththat must never be trod…
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Posted inReligions

Islamic Shariah law to be enforced by Taliban

The Taliban say they're going to rule Afghanistan under Shariah law, which is based on Islamic tradition and authority, such as the Koran.  This doesn't bode well for Afghan women.  So I'm curious. Many commenters on this blog are religious. They believe in God. They accept the authority of religious leaders. The Taliban are religious. They believe in God. They accept the authority of religious leaders. Explain then, religious commenters, why you likely reject the Taliban's religious beliefs, while you consider your own to be so worthy.  The Taliban think they are acting in accord with the will of God.…
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Posted inSpiritual practice/meditation

Transcendence and immanence: two paths to attain oneness

It's important to not get one-sided in our approach to meditation and spirituality. After all, oneness is a laudable goal, even if it can't be attained perfectly. (If there truly was only one, there would be no one else to know there was only one, so oneness would never be experienced.) A one-sided coin doesn't exist. It takes two sides to make a coin.  So we shouldn't get locked into a single way of looking upon oneness. Many commenters on this blog appear to be so enamored with transcendence -- leaving this world behind to find a better one --…
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Posted inGod Science

If “God” is all there is, science is the way to know God

The August 16, 2021 issue of The New Yorker has a fascinating article about the new James Webb Space Telescope that will be launched soon. It will be much more powerful than the Hubble space telescope.  I liked the end of "The Youthful Universe." You can read it below. Science truly is our best way of learning about "God" -- if by that word is meant everything that exists. That's how I've come to view God. Sometimes during my day I'll say, "Thank you God." I'm not thanking a divine being. I don't believe in supernatural entities. Rather, I use…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas

It took a while for this person to give up on RSSB

Yesterday I got this message from someone who said it would be fine to share what they said, but not their name. I always feel good when I hear that someone has benefitted from my blog posts. I've told this person that I don't know what has happened to tAo. His comments were indeed interesting. But change is inevitable, including who comments on this blog.  Hello Brain , how u doing n hope u r doing great at ur end. I am ________, initiated by Baba Gurinder Singh G in 2003. I am 45 years old now. I born and…
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