Posted inDeath/Rebirth Science

Christof Koch presents a good analysis of near-death experiences

Are near-death experiences purely physical, or do they provide a glimpse into a mystical realm beyond ordinary awareness?  The June 2020 issue of Scientific American has an article by Christof Koch that delves into this question. "Tales of the Dying Brain" is well worth a read regardless of how you look upon near-death experiences. Koch makes clear his basic stance on this subject, one that I heartily agree with. I accept the reality of these intensely felt experiences. They are as authentic as any other subjective feeling or perception. As a scientist, however, I operate under the hypothesis that all…
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Posted inBooks Meaning of life

Cats have no need of philosophy or religion

John Gray is an author who is sometimes irritating (to me, at least) but always interesting. He provokes in intelligent, witty, well-reasoned ways. My main gripe about Gray is that he often uses a sort of "straw man" argument where he selects the writings of one person to represent a much more diverse way of thinking. He did this in Seven Types of Atheism, which I thought I'd enjoy but instead found annoying for that reason. But after seeing a mention of his new book in The New Yorker, I eagerly bought a copy of Feline Philosophy: Cats and the…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories

2020 sucked, but our Christmas letter finds some humor in Covid

This wasn't a great year, to put it mildly.  At first I wondered if I should even write our usual Christmas letter, which Laurel, my wife, and I call a Holiday Letter since we don't believe in Christ or any other imaginary god/supernatural being. (I share it as a "Christmas letter" because that's how most people refer to these things.) Laurel convinced me that finding some humor in tough times is a good thing. So after writing a serious first draft of the letter, I started over last night and composed a lighter version.  Here it is, in PDF and…
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Posted inBuddhism Reality

My podcast interview with Marie D’Elephant was enjoyable

Yesterday I spent 1 hour and 48 minutes talking with Marie D'Elephant for a podcast that's scheduled to be released on February 4 via her Everyone's Autonomous Podcast site.  Here's the description of what D'Elephant is up to. During the Everyone's Agnostic podcast from 2015-2019, we shared our stories of religious trauma and the pain of deconversion.  When that podcast went on a hiatus, a beautiful child was born: Everyone's Autonomous by Marie D'Elephant. She picks up the discussion by talking with guests and subject matter experts about how we can begin to move forward after having processed our toxic…
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Posted inBuddhism Death/Rebirth

I never was, so I always will be

Profound? Obvious? Confusing? Meaningless?  No matter what you might think of this blog post title, I reply: Yes, Yes, Yes, and...Yes. In other words, I agree with you. I take this stance because I like the one-sentence statement that popped into my head a week or so ago, stimulated, I suspect, by the Buddhist books I've been re-reading lately. So it doesn't really matter how anyone else looks upon I never was, so I always will be. Those words resonate with me, because they seem absolutely true. Let's examine why I say this. I never was points to the absence…
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Posted inUncategorized

Well stated criticism of RSSB guru and satsangi behavior

Here at the Church of the Churchless we love it when someone speaks their truth about how followers of a religion, or a religious leader, are acting badly.  So when I read a recent comment from "Miss Judy", I knew it deserved to be shared in a blog post. Which I've done. I've corrected a few typos. "Babi ji" refers to Gurinder Singh Dhillon, the guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), a religious organization based in India. "Sindhis," according to Wikipedia, are a socio-ethnic group in India originating from Sindh, a province of modern-day Pakistan. "Satsangis" are members of RSSB.…
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Posted inBooks God

Humans create God, not the other way around

Since there is no demonstrable evidence that God exists, where does the concept of "God" come from? Obviously, from the minds of humans. We create the idea of God, which includes the fantasy that God created us. The November 9, 2020 issue of The New Yorker has an interesting review of a book by a Stanford anthropologist, T.M. Luhrmann, "How God Becomes Real." Basically, by people doing things that conjure up their imagined God, in somewhat the same way as the reader of a novel throws themself into the story line to such a degree, the fictional creation can seem…
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Posted inMeaning of life

I share a guest post from myself about loving the life you’re with

Thank you, me, for giving permission to myself to share on this blog a post I wrote for my HinesSight blog on Thanksgiving Day. I truly am thankful that I am so generous with myself. So check out "If you can't be with the life you love, love the life you're with." You get extra credit if you're able to identify the source of the saying that I adapted for the blog post title. Here's an excerpt from the post. Sure, it's wonderful to be thankful. However, life is difficult. And I hate to break this news to you younger…
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Posted inPolitics Reality

Political and religious delusions have a lot in common

Reality only comes in one flavor: real. But humans aren't in direct touch with reality, so we have to struggle to make sense of the world, the universe, the cosmos. Thus the flavor of reality for us Homo sapiens has many varieties. Really, as many as there are people in the world, since everybody looks upon life in a unique way. Science is our most powerful means of coming to a consensus on the nature of reality. By and large, scientists the world over agree on core scientific tenets -- which is far different from the widely divergent ways politicians and…
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Posted inCoronavirus Death/Rebirth

Religion is anti-life when an afterlife is fantasized

I want to get some facts straight. (1) Every living entity dies.(2) This includes humans.(3) So you, I, and everybody else will die.(4) There is no solid evidence of life after death.(5) Yet religions claim there's an afterlife. It's difficult to see how anybody could disagree with 1-3 and 5. Plus, 4 is almost indisputable, since any evidence of life after death is extremely tenuous, unscientific, and open to dispute. Given these facts, I can't understand why so many Americans look upon our current COVID-19 death count, of 266,000, Washington Post screenshot shown above, and shrug off the astounding number.…
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Posted inGod

What God might say, according to Spinoza

The following post turned up in my Facebook feed yesterday. Based on my understanding of Spinoza, I have some doubts that this really reflects his perspective on God, but it might.  Regardless, I liked what Jillenne Moore shared in her post. (I'm assuming that Moore wrote it.) When Einstein gave lectures at U.S. universities, the question students asked him most was: Do you believe in God? And he always answered: I believe in the God of Spinoza. Baruch de Spinoza was a Dutch philosopher considered one of the great rationalists of 17th century philosophy, along with Descartes. According to Spinoza,…
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Posted inBooks Morality Science

Humans are animals. Religions should accept this fact.

Frans de Waal has written a fascinating book about animal intelligence, "Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?" I'm only a little ways into the book, but what I've read so far has gotten me to thinking about how religions view humans -- as animals, or as a non-animal species? Here's a passage from the prologue that makes clear how de Waal looks upon this question. In all this, we love to compare and contrast animal and human intelligence, taking ourselves as the touchstone. It is good to realize, though, that this is an outdated way of…
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Posted inBooks Buddhism

Your soul can’t be found because it doesn’t exist

I'm enjoying my re-reading, or re-re-reading, given the highlighting I've done to this book, of Guy Newland's "Introduction to Emptiness: Tsong-Kha-Pa's Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path." It's a brilliant discussion of a core Buddhist notion, defined as the sheer nonexistence of intrinsic nature. In other words, nothing is intrinsically itself. Everything depends on other things for its existence, us naturally included. Nothing stands on its own, an island unto itself. Interconnectedness and interdependency is how the cosmos works. So Buddhism is unique among the world's major religions in not positing an eternal soul. (Because it isn't really…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas

New development in Singh brothers/RSSB guru scandal may not mean much

Today someone sent me a link to a November 12, 2o20 story in the Economic Times, "Sebi disposes of proceedings against 16 entities in Religare Finvest fund diversion case." That person wondered if this meant that Gurinder Singh Dhillon, the guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas, had been cleared of wrongdoing in the complex financial scandal involving the Dhillon family and their relatives, Malvinder and Shivinder Singh, along with associates of the guru such as Sunil Godhwani. I've copied in the Economic Times story below. It's difficult to know what to make of it. As far as I can tell,…
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Posted inBooks Reality

Behold my use of “Wittgenstein” in this blog post title

I've been hanging onto my copy of the October 19 issue of The New Yorker because it contains a book review ("Losing Propositions") about the state of philosophy in Europe after the First World War. The review has numerous mentions of Ludwig Wittgenstein, "perhaps the most influential philosopher of the twentieth century." So this gives me the opportunity to use Wittgenstein in the title of this post -- which in my utterly subjective opinion, elevates the profundity of this blog to an even higher level. What I liked most  about the book review were the parts dealing with language that…
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Posted inBuddhism Spiritual practice/meditation

Clear thinking is a big part of Buddhist spirituality

I've never understood why some people are so down on thinking as an avenue to spiritual growth -- using "spiritual" in a non-supernatural sense, basically an exploration of what it means to be a caring, compassionate person who is grounded in reality. Naturally those thinking skeptics express their view in, no big surprise, thoughts. So they cast doubt on the value of thought while thinking thoughts.  One reason I enjoy reading Buddhist books (non-religious variety) is that Buddhism is fine with thinking. Also, with not thinking. That's an example of the middle way favored by Buddhists. Thinking and not thinking…
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Posted inPolitics Religions

Speak out! About politics, religion, everything.

Over on my Salem Political Snark blog, yesterday I wrote "Speak out about Trump's attempt to steal the election."  Almost certainly Trump won't succeed in this. His defeat was so large, extending over five states that he won in 2016 and lost in 2020 (Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia), there's no way lawsuits and recounts are going to overturn Biden's win. Still, it's important for everyone who cares about democracy to speak out against this attempt to thwart the will of voters, even if it has little chance of coming to pass. I shared some excerpts from a September 2020…
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Posted inPolitics

Fact-denying Republicans are like fact-denying religious people

Like lots of other Americans, I'm really happy about Joe Biden defeating Donald Trump in our presidential election. To learn how happy, check out three posts I've written on my other blogs -- here, here, and here. It's virtually 100% certain that Biden won a free and fair election and will be sworn in as president next January. He's on track to win 306 electoral votes, the same number Trump won in 2016, which Trump has never stopped bragging about. The popular vote is hugely in Biden's favor, with additional tallies in New York and California adding to that impressive…
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Posted inPolitics

Am I happy about Trump’s defeat? Hell, yes!

Tonight I wrote another post on my Salem Political Snark blog about Donald Trump's ever-so-pleasing defeat to Joe Biden, the next President of the United States.  I called it, "Trump may never concede, but Biden has whipped his ass." Here's what I said, along with the tweets that I included in the post. Last Tuesday was tough for progressives like me. Sure, I knew that mail-in ballots, largely from Democrats, were going to take a while to count, and in-person voting on election day would be dominated by Republicans. But knowing is one thing. Emotions are a whole other thing. …
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Posted inBooks

Wabi sabi: imperfection is the natural state of everything

Perfection is a concept of something that doesn't exist. Nonetheless, we humans cause ourselves grief as we try to attain this non-existent notion.  Too often, our goal is to have a perfect mate, a perfect body, perfect children, a perfect job, a perfect religion, a perfect home decor. Sure, we know that it really isn't possible to achieve the goal of perfection. But it is something to aim for. However, not to those who embrace the subtle Japanese idea, or feeling, of Wabi sabi. Last year I wrote a blog post on this subject after starting to read Beth Kempton's…
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