Posted inDeath/Rebirth

Death of 14-year-old boy shows appeal of religion

Death sucks. But death is inevitable. It happens to everybody. There's no exceptions. Yet for senior citizens  like me -- I'm 69 -- we've had many years of living that make our eventual demise seem, if not appealing, at least part of the natural course of things. A child's death, though... that's a whole different thing. Today I read a story in our local newspaper, the Salem Statesman Journal, about the death of a 14-year-old boy from a rare form of bone cancer.  It was heartbreaking.  Jack Schumacher lived for baseball. He was good at math, loved LEGOs and loved…
4
Posted inBooks Personal/Stories

“God’s Whisper, Creation’s Thunder” is back in print, shorter and simplified

Big news! Also, kind of weird news.  Now-atheist me has gotten a second edition of the book written by previous-religious-believer me back in print. It took me many years to do this after the initial publisher went of business, but I finally got around to it. (Note: the paperback version was available May 8 on Amazon, but it took this long for a Kindle version to be prepared, then linked to the paperback listing on Amazon.) Yes, Amazon has "God's Whisper, Creation's Thunder: Echoes of Spiritual Reality in the New Physics" available for $13 in paperback and $3.99 for the…
4
Posted inBooks Buddhism

Can’t stop quoting from “Ending the Pursuit of Happiness: A Zen Guide”

Zen, along with Buddhism in general, teaches that nothing is permanent, everything changes. So even though right now I feel like I can't stop sharing quotes from my re-reading of Barry Magid's book, Ending the Pursuit of Happiness: A Zen Guide, clearly I will at some point.  Like maybe tomorrow, not today. Here's more passages from the book that appealed to my churchless consciousness. Which follow a Zen cartoon. "Karma means "cause and effect," which is another way of describing interconnection and change. Enlightenment is the realization of our being the ongoing product of interconnection and change -- it is…
30
Posted inOpen Threads

Open Thread 14 (free speech for comments)

Leave a comment on this post about anything you want to talk about. Though I haven't been doing too well on this, I'll try to remember to always have an Open Thread showing in the Recent Posts section in the right sidebar. If one isn't showing, I've added an Open Threads category in, naturally, the Categories section. So you can always find an Open Thread that way.
40
Posted inBooks Buddhism

Great quotes from “Ending the Pursuit of Happiness: A Zen Guide”

I'm a big fan of Zen, though I've never actually practiced with a Zen teacher, and I'm turned off by overly dogmatic or religious versions of Zen Buddhism.  Yesterday I was idly glancing at the Zen section of my bookcase and noticed a book that I'd read nine years ago and blogged about in "Search for happiness (and self) called off." I'm enjoying a re-reading of Barry Magid's Ending the Pursuit of Happiness: A Zen Guide. Magid is a psychoanalyst with an appealing take on Zen. He founded the Ordinary Mind Zendo in New York City and still teaches there.…
10
Posted inGod

Five reasons why I don’t believe in God

Since 2004 I've written 2,365 posts on this here Church of the Churchless blog. That's a scarily large number, which testifies to my commitment to churchlessness after spending 35 years being firmly churched in an Indian guru-based form of religiosity. During the past fourteen years I've talked a lot about why I no longer believe in God. I've put forth numerous reasons for my conversion to atheism. Here's a fairly brief description of five key reasons.  (1) Existence must always have existed. Most religions teach that God brought our universe into existence. But I've never heard any believer argue that…
28
Posted inPersonal/Stories Spiritual practice/meditation

How I’m content with an atheistic world view

Today I got an email message from someone who asked a great question about finding contentment with an atheistic world view. I dashed off a response right away, because I loved how this person described their quandary, and how clearly their youthful angst was expressed. Speaking of love, which the person said was their "entire meaning in life," you'll see that I didn't mention love in my reply. I thought about this only after I'd sent my response. It isn't that love isn't important to me, or that it isn't a big part of my life. I guess it is…
25
Posted inBooks Morality

Why do gods and spirits matter?

The title of this blog post asks a question that's a chapter title in Pascal Boyer's challenging, but intensely interesting, book, "Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought." Boyer is an anthropologist who is also well-versed in psychology. His book isn't an easy read, but I'm enjoying making my way through it, occasionally by skipping a chapter and moving ahead to a chapter that grabs my attention more. Not surprisingly, I'm carefully reading the "Why do gods and spirits matter?" chapter, since this is such an important question. Below is how the chapter starts off. I decided to share…
8
Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas Religions

Why this atheist is more saintly than religious believers

This proves nothing except that seeming synchronicities sometimes occur in a pseudo-miraculous fashion. This afternoon I was thinking about what to write about on this here Church of the Churchless blog, and came up with the idea of talking about how I happily allow about 90% of the blog comments to be from religious believers, almost all of whom are still adherents of the Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) faith that I deconverted from about fourteen years ago -- after being a strong RSSB devotee for some thirty-five years.I was going to point out that this shows how much more…
132
Posted inReality Religions Science

A test that science passes and religion fails: reality “kicks back”

How do we know what is real? This is a question that has occupied philosophers and scientists for as long as we humans have been pondering the nature of reality. I don't pretend to know the answer, but I resonate with physicist David Deutsch's approach to the question. In his book, "The Fabric of Reality," Deutsch views explanations as being key to understanding what is real. He writes: Explanations are not justified by the means by which they were derived; they are justified by their superior ability, relative to rival explanations, to solve the problems they address. That is why…
24
Posted inReality

All problems and solutions are within the mind, not the world

One reason I love to read is that a few sentences in a book can make me go Wow! or Whoa! to such an extent, I feel like it is worth reading hundreds of pages to be exposed to a single fresh thought. That happened to me this morning as I was reading the "Criteria for Reality" chapter in physicist David Deutsch's book, The Fabric of Reality. Here's what grabbed my attention: Galileo may have seen the world as a book in which the laws of nature are written in mathematical symbols. But that is strictly a metaphor; there are…
12
Posted inAwareness Science

Awareness is a process, not a thing

I'm aware of typing on my laptop right now. And after writing those words, I'm also aware that I'm aware of typing on my laptop. This second type of awareness is called meta-awareness, a term I came across in a book I'm reading, "Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body." The authors, Daniel Goleman and Richard Davidson, write: When we did our first vipassana courses in India, we found ourselves immersed hour after hour in noting the comings and goings of our mind, cultivating stability by simply noticing rather than following where those thoughts, impulses,…
15
Posted inReligions Science

All statements about the material world are subject to science

"Spirituality" is a word that's difficult to pin down. In my current atheist frame of mind, I consider that the term refers to an attempt to find meaning in life -- this material life, this physical life, this life here on Earth.  Such is how Daniele Bolelli speaks of the need to rekindle our appreciation of what the senses bring to us. In his book, "On the Warrior's Path," he writes: Our bodies are the kingdom of lost continents and unknown lands. Columbus, Livingstone, Stanley, Marco Polo, and Neil Armstrong are just Boy Scouts compared to the explorers of the…
4
Posted inChristianity/Jesus

Story of an intriguing LSD experience where Jesus appears

Can LSD reveal the nature of God? Here's the story of someone who took LSD and had an amazing experience of both the "beast" (Satan?) and Jesus. This person didn't want their name to be known, so I've left that out. Otherwise I've shared what was sent to me unaltered. Our correspondence started with this message from the person. Brian, I've read Return to the One, am working through God's Whisper and have ordered Life is Fair.  I read most of the Sant Mat books also.   I thought you might be interested in a mystical experience I had in 1968. …
6
Posted inPersonal/Stories

Taking a risk, like sky diving, can be a shortcut to mindfulness

There's nothing like doing something that could kill you to concentrate one's mind. Many years ago I remember reading an article in Parade magazine that contained a quote from an Iraq war veteran that said something similar: "Everybody needs something in their life that can kill them."  For three years, 2009 to 2012, I rode a maxi-scooter -- a Burgman 650 Executive. I loved it. (My wife, not so much, as noted in a blog post, "USA Today story about older motorcycle riders mentions...ME!") Riding the Burgman 650, as is the case with all motorcycles/scooters, focused my attention on the…
35
Posted inBooks Science

A quest for spiritual liberation can lead to new illusions

Some scientific findings contained in an article in the April 2 issue of The New Yorker, "Are We Already Living In Virtual Reality?" bear on the question of what meditation is all about, and the extent to which meditation liberates us from anything. The article is about Thomas Metzinger, a philosophically-minded neuroscientist. As you can read in the excerpt below, Metzinger speaks about our inability to recognize the unconscious mental models that determine how we experience reality. In his book, The Ego Tunnel, which I've read and enjoyed, Metzinger speaks of the walls of the tunnel as being transparent to…
4
Posted inChristianity/Jesus

Here’s what this atheist has written about Easter

It's the day after Easter, and I didn't write a irreligious blog post yesterday. But, hey, Monday is another day! So here goes.  The best pithy comment I saw yesterday was on Twitter: Nicely said. This sums up my attitude toward Easter, which celebrates the supposed resurrection of Jesus. For further delving into how I view Easter, here's links to my previous blog posts about this religious holiday, with an excerpt from each. Before Easter, I escape death. I feel sort of Jesus'y. If I believed in reincarnation (I don't), then it would be easy for me to imagine that…
7
Posted inOpen Threads

Open Thread 13 (free speech for comments)

Leave a comment on this post about anything you want to talk about. Though I haven't been doing too well on this, I'll try to remember to always have an Open Thread showing in the Recent Posts section in the right sidebar. If one isn't showing, I've added an Open Threads category in, naturally, the Categories section. So you can always find an Open Thread that way.
367
Posted inBooks Science

Steven Pinker defends Enlightenment values

My wife, Laurel, belongs to the Freedom From Religion Foundation, which publishes an excellent publication, Free Thought Today. The most recent issue has an edited version of Steven Pinker's speech to the FFRF convention in 2017 where he talks about the message of his new book, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. You can read the Free Thought Today story, "Knowledge has enhanced human flourishing," online. Here's how it starts out: It is an honor to speak about my forthcoming book in public for the first time in front of this audience. We’re going to begin…
2