Posted inBooks Spiritual practice/meditation

Meditation without God works just as well

I don't believe in God. Yet I also don't know that God doesn't exist. I just see no compelling evidence for God. So, like space aliens, I choose not to believe in something about which rumors abound without demonstrable proof of them being true. I do believe in the value of meditation. I've meditated almost every morning since I was twenty years old. Given that I'm sixty-one now, meditation has been part of my daily activity for two-thirds of my life. I enjoyed meditating when I was churched, and I still enjoy it in my churchless phase. A book that…
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Posted inBooks

Jon Stewart sucks up to religion, sadly

Oh, Jon, you failed me. My wife and I watch The Daily Show almost every night, and we enjoy your skewering of political, religious, and other varieties of pretentiousness.But last night your interview with Marilynne Robinson, author of "Absence of Mind," was pathetically weak. PZ Myers, an avid defender of science and attacker of religiosity, also felt let down by you. The low point came as Stewart tried to justify Robinson's nebulous argument that science and religion need each other, and he offered stock apologetics.The more you delve into science, the more it relies on faith.No, it doesn't. The less…
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Posted inBooks Reality

Why we’re all Muslims (a teeny, tiny bit)

I'm making my way through Stephen Prothero's "God is Not One," a book about how the eight major religions of the world are not at all the same -- much more like roads that head off in different directions than paths leading to the same summit.In my first post about "God is Not One" after only reading the introduction, I predicted that I'd like Prothero's book. I was right. The next chapter on Islam was clearly written and offered up some fresh insights on what the author considers to be the world's most influential religion.Here's what struck me the most…
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Posted inBooks God

“God is Not One” shows how different religions are

A few days ago I was drawn to buy "God is Not One" by Stephen Prothero after seeing Stephen Colbert interview him in Colbert's always entertaining fashion. Prothero gives his take on the interview here, and you can watch it below.The Colbert ReportMon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30cStephen Protherowww.colbertnation.comColbert Report Full EpisodesPolitical HumorFox NewsI liked how Prothero emphasized how different are the problems religions attempt to solve. Christianity is all about being saved from sin; Buddhism aims to eliminate suffering; Hinduism seeks freedom from reincarnation's rounds of birth and death; Daoism teaches how to live life naturally and freely.(If you're…
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Posted inBooks Wu Project

Boundless Existence — meaningless backdrop to a meaningful life

As I said in my previous post about Milton Munitz' marvelous book, "Does Life Have a Meaning," the notion of boundless existence sends a chill up my churchless spine. This isn't really a "notion," though. Munitz makes clear that the awareness of That -- That existence exists -- can never be anything more than exactly That: simple awareness, without any cognitive content of What boundless existence is.At best, all we can have is an awareness of Boundless Existence. But this awareness is not an exercise in understanding, of making possible a kind of intelligibility. Nor is it a case of…
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Posted inBooks Reality

Reality is real, but brains construct knowledge

When Amazon delivered Paul Thagard's "The Brain and the Meaning of Life," I knew I was going to enjoy the book after I perused some chapter titles -- the first four being We All Need Wisdom, Evidence Beats Faith, Minds are Brains, and How Brains Know Reality.  Ah, inspiration for my churchless non-soul. I'm one chapter away from finishing the book. Probably I'll write another post about it after I read Making Sense of It All. (I can only hope; that's a pretty confident claim for a chapter.)Here I'll focus on some key concepts in How Brains Know Reality. This subject…
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Posted inBooks Buddhism Spiritual practice/meditation

Meditation: nothing special, whatever is going on

Cosmic. Earthy. Whichever, or neither, the day after I asked (and answered) "Is meditation different from simply living life?" I came across a great little book by Steve Hagen that addressed the same question.I found "Meditation: Now or Never" in a Malibu metaphysical bookstore. My wife and I were spending a few last hours shopping in the Malibu Country Mart after a pleasant weekend of granddaughter-visiting and beautiful people-watching. (See here.)I've enjoyed Hagen's other books, "Buddhism Plain and Simple" and "Buddhism is Not What You Think." When religiosity is stripped away from Buddhism, I find it pretty darn appealing.We experience…
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Posted inBooks

Our “hidden brain” casts new light on religious certainty

Shankar Vedantam's book "The Hidden Brain" is subtitled how our unconscious minds elect presidents, control markets, wage wars, and save our lives. I'd add: and choose our favored form of spirituality or religion (or lack thereof).I've only read the first few chapters of The Hidden Brain. But my wife, a retired psychotherapist, has listened to the audio book in its entirety. She gave it high marks, so I decided to order a hardcover copy. Vedantam's basic premise is solid. It's backed up by lots of scientific research. (Vedantam writes the Washington Post's "Department of Human Behavior" column, so he knows…
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Posted inBooks

Dan Barker’s “Godless” is marvelous

There's atheists, and then there's Atheists! Dan Barker is one of the latter, an activist, in-your-face, eloquent promoter of "Who knows?" over "I have faith that..."I've mentioned Barker's book, "Godless," in quite a few previous posts. (To find them, scroll down and use the Great Genuine God Google search box in the right column of this blog; type in "Dan Barker.")Barker speaks of what he knows when he writes about religiosity, because he used to be an ardent evangelical Christian preacher. Eventually he saw the light and became an atheist agnostic.If that sounds funny, Barker explains:People are invariably surprised to…
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Posted inBooks Vedanta/Advaita

Non-duality both appeals and repels (appropriately)

Here's my bottom line on non-dualism: it's either (1) the best take on ultimate reality that humans have ever come up with, or (2) a total crock of shit. Of course, if (1) is the case then seemingly both (1) and (2) are true -- since either/or distinctions don't have much of a place in non-dualism.I got to pondering this stuff after Amazon sucked me in this morning with one of their irritatingly accurate emails. (If there is a God, his name is Jeff Bezos).Amazon apparently looks at the books I buy and then correlates them with other books favored…
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Posted inBooks Science

“Natural Reflections” shows how science is superior

I've finished reading Barbara Herrnstein Smith's "Natural Reflections," which I blogged about before on the basis of a New York Times review.Smith's main thesis is that science and religion are, well, natural reflections of each other. This is a seriously scholarly book and I'm not crystal clear about what she means by this. But her final two paragraphs summarize her case in an agreeable fashion.Scientists share cognitive tendencies, achievements, and limits with nonscientists; religious believers share them with nonbelievers. Although each may put the world together and conduct his or her life in ways that are at odds with or…
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Posted inBooks Christianity/Jesus Religions

Talking about religion is good, preaching is bad

A friend of mine has a great way of dealing with Jehovah's Witnesses who knock on his door, proselytizing pamphlets in hand. He tells them enthusiastically, "Great to see you! Come on in! I want to tell you about how wonderful my religion is. It'll just take a couple of hours."I don't think he's gotten any takers. It's funny how religious true believers are really eager to talk about the marvelousness of their own faith, yet usually shy away from learning about other points of view or philosophies of life.So I think Ross Douhat made some good points in his…
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Posted inBooks Religions Science

“The Quotable Atheist” is well worth quoting

My daughter, a chip off of her dad's churchless block, gave me The Quotable Atheist for Christmas. Organized alphabetically, I'm all the way up to "B." Lots of more great quotes to enjoy.I could tell I was going to enjoy the book as soon as I started reading the Introduction by Jack Huberman. He's got an engaging "take no prisoners in the war against religion" attitude. Here's some Huberman quotes.The world (not just America) is deeply divided. The main fault line is where the tectonic plates of religion and of reason/ secularism/ modernity/ science/ Enlightenment meet and grind against each…
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Posted inBooks Fundamentalism

Andrew Cohen — an abusive American guru

Outrage. Anger. Disgust. An overwhelming desire to cancel my subscription to the EnlightenNext magazine. These were some of my reactions as I read through an expose of Andrew Cohen, a self-proclaimed "guru" who talks a good spirituality game but clearly plays by very different rules.Earlier I shared some passages from Stephen Bachelor's excellent introduction to "American Guru," a book authored by William Yenner and other contributors who were long-time disciples of Cohen and experienced or saw his abuses first-hand.As the events recounted in this book reveal, Cohen's demonization of his students' "egoic tendencies" -- tendencies which he himself has supposedly…
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Posted inBooks God

“The Evolution of God” falls flat at the end

My prophesy turned out to be correct: I didn't agree with the final chapters of Robert Wright's "The Evolution of God," just as I anticipated.But there wasn't anything miraculous in my ability to see into the future, just as a transcendent divinity isn't needed to explain how religions change over the course of history -- embracing, by and large, a more inclusive, tolerant, and universal moral code.Mostly, this is what Wright says in his book. This book’s account of the moral direction of history has been a materialist account. We’ve explained the expansion of the moral imagination as an outgrowth…
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Posted inBooks God

God offers up whatever religions think will sell

God is a human invention. Notions about God evolve with the times, changing with cultural and societal circumstances.These are some central themes of Robert Wright's "The Evolution of God," a fascinating book that I've about two-thirds through. He further illuminates a lot of misgivings I've had about religion.Like, how religious leaders -- whether of East or West, a guru or the Pope -- basically are selling salvation. Not for money, usually, but in exchange for buying into a belief system. For example, in his section on Christianity Wright talks about how the earliest descriptions of Jesus' teachings didn't say anything…
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Posted inBooks

“The Untethered Soul” gets a 3/4 churchless thumbs up

Let's start mildly negative with this book review so I can end up strongly positive. I can understand why the author, Michael A. Singer, wanted this blurb prominently displayed on the cover, but I was turned off by it:"Read this book carefully and you will get more than a glimpse of eternity."     --Deepak ChopraI haven't been impressed by Chopra's own writings, though some of what he says resonates with me. So I was afraid that "The Untethered Soul" was going to be as New Age'y as Chopra's blurb implied.More than a glimpse of eternity? Gag me with a skeptical spoon.…
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Posted inBooks Morality

Without God, how can religion be divine?

I thought I'd just thrown twenty bucks down a non-fiction hole. A few scant hours after buying Robert Wright's "The Evolution of God" (at 25% off!) my wife, who was reading the Sunday Oregonian, said: "You're not going to like this review of the book you just got." She was right. Thumbing through the first few pages of the book while considering whether to buy it, I'd focused on Wright's first hand.On the one hand, I think gods arose as illusions, and the subsequent history of the idea of god is, in some sense, the evolution of an illusion.That elicited a…
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Posted inBooks

Floating in a boundless sea

Before Jed McKenna's "Spiritual Enlightenment" is put away on a shelf, I wanted to add some positivity to my previous mostly negative post about the book -- which I finished today.I still don't like how McKenna fictionalizes what is presented as reality: that he is an enlightened teacher who presides over a fawning group of non-dual truth seekers at his quasi-ashram in rural Iowa. And I still doubt both that enlightenment exists, at least in the fashion McKenna describes it to be, or that he has achieved the state of all-knowing clarity which McKenna annoyingly claims on page after page…
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Posted inBooks

“Cosmic Connection” review: a fresh take on channeling

I'm not a believer in mediums or channeling. But I'm open to the possibility of tapping into some sort of cosmic consciousness that is way beyond the bounds of everyday human awareness.So when a publicist for Carole Lynne, who wrote "Cosmic Connection: Messages for a Better World," asked me in an email if I'd be willing to read the book and write a review, I replied "sure."Free books attract me. Plus, an overview of Cosmic Connection said that Lynne felt that she was tapping into an impersonal consciousness, not the psyches of departed souls. That makes more sense to me…
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