Posted inGod Religions

Are you religious or spiritual? Take the test.

Often people say, “I’m spiritual but not religious.” Understandable. Religion, after all, has some notorious drawbacks. Intolerance, divisiveness, sanctimoniousness, irrationality—to name a few. But what does it mean to be non-religious? I’ve just started reading Daniel Dennett’s “Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon” and came across his intriguing definition: Tentatively, I propose to define religions as social systems whose participants avow belief in a supernatural agent or agents whose approval is to be sought. Interesting. And persuasive to me. Not least because this definition by a professional philosopher meshes nicely with my “turn on or tune in?” distinction.…
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Posted inBooks Christianity/Jesus Fundamentalism

“God Laughs and Plays” but doesn’t go to church

I figured that I’d enjoy a book subtitled “Churchless Sermons in Response to the Preachments of the Fundamentalist Right.” And I did. “God Laughs and Plays” is David James Duncan’s paean to fly-fishing rather than pew-sitting, to practicing Christian love rather than judgmental hatred, to finding inspiration in God’s natural creation rather than the artificial human dogma found in misnamed “holy” books. A talented writer like Duncan best speaks for himself. So I’ll shut up and let him do the saying. Here’s some passages that I especially liked: Intense spiritual feelings were frequent visitors during my boyhood, but they did…
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Posted inGod

With God, from “I believe” to “I know” is a huge step

I was mildly surprised at how strongly I reacted to a comment by “A friend” made on my “Turn on, tune in, or drop out?” post. If you read my response (in the form of another comment), you’ll note a decided tone of what I like to call irony, but others could reasonably term sarcasm. Pondering my reaction, here’s how I explain it: If you say to me, “When it comes to God, I don’t know,” we’re comrades in unknowing. Grab a chair and belly up with me to the clueless bar. If you say to me, “When it comes…
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Posted inGod Mystics Plotinus

Simple spirituality

I’m attracted to simplicity. My mind is complex, like most minds are. So in spite of this, or because of this, a great big “Yes!” resonates in my psyche when I come across seriously simple summations of spirituality. (Guess I should make that a “Yes-s-s-s!”) “God is love.” Pretty good. But that’s too simple for me. And overly Hallmark cardish. I prefer Meister Eckhart’s way of putting it. A wonderful blend of simplicity and profundity. The eye with which I see God is exactly the same eye with which God sees me. My eye and God’s eye are one eye,…
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Posted inGod

How can you be sure there is no God?

Good question. Easy answer: I can’t. I don’t know if God exists. Here’s another question. “How can you be sure there is a God?” The correct answer is equally easy: You can’t. You don’t know if God exists. So we’re really in complete agreement. I don’t know and you don’t know. On this, agnostics and the faithful are as one. At least, they should be. Such is the well-reasoned conclusion of the convincing “How can you be sure there is no God?” essay that I recently read on the Ex-Christian.net web site. Unfortunately, most believers deny the reality of their…
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Posted inGod Radha Soami Satsang Beas

Does God play favorites? I doubt it.

It’d be wonderful if God favored some people over others. So long as I was among them. Otherwise, I’d be on the outside of God’s Favor Party, wishing that I was part of the in-crowd. As I’ve noted before, and surely will again, it’s amazing how almost every religion believes that its adherents are the only favored ones. Jews are a chosen people. Christians have been singled out for salvation. Muslims are beneficiaries of the ultimate revelation. Eastern religions are less prone to believing in favoritism, but even in Buddhism there is the assumption that following the Buddha’s teachings is…
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Posted inGod

God calls me a fool. I agree.

Churchless brothers and sisters, God spoke to me this morning. Now the spirit is calling me to share the word. I’m just a tool. Also, a fool. That was the message: “Brian, you don’t know.” To which I replied, “Oh God, you’re so right. I don’t know.” Now, I can hear the skeptics asking, “How do you know that God was speaking to you if what you heard was, You don’t know?” Well, all I can say is that I know what I know, and I don’t know what I don’t know. And I know that God was letting me…
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Posted inGod Radha Soami Satsang Beas

Going beyond religious concepts

Here’s one of the handful of passages from countless spiritual books that I’ve read which truly resonate with me. As I said in “Start erasing your spiritual blackboard,” I’m a believer in writings that say “Don’t believe in me.” This is one of those. It comes from a well-thumbed book of mine, “The Master Answers.” Published by Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), the book consists of verbal questions directed to Charan Singh, an Indian guru, and his off-the-cuff answers. Near the end of my RSSB speaking career, I kept coming back to the following question and answer about the nature…
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Posted inGod Religions

Mine disaster shows absurdity of prayer

“Just a few minutes before they were praising God, and now they were cursing.” That’s how a relative of one of the men trapped in the West Virginia mine described the abrupt mood change when the crowd gathered in a church learned that all but one of the miners actually were dead—not alive, as they had been mistakenly told several hours earlier. It shows the absurdity of prayer. The belief that God listens to pleas such as “Save the trapped miners, Lord” and decides whether or not to intervene in human affairs almost certainly is superstition. If prayer has any…
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Posted inChristianity/Jesus God

God is born in everybody, not just Jesus

With the supposed day of Jesus’ birth about to be celebrated tomorrow, it’s worth remembering that God became human not just once a few thousand years ago but countless times. Such is the teaching of the German Dominican Meister Eckhart, one of my favorite mystical theologians. Back in the middle ages he reached understandings about God, Jesus, and the incarnation that are much more spiritually advanced than the confused rantings of modern Christian fundamentalists, who mistakenly worship Jesus as if he was a one-time special deal. Rather, says Eckhart: People think that God became human only in the Incarnation, but…
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Posted inGod Mystics

The nothingness we fear is the everything we are

What do we fear the most? Losing our identity, a firm sense of who we are. And how does every deep mystic tradition describe the highest reality? As an entity with no characteristics that can be described, existing as it does outside of all limitations and boundaries. This is one of the many enlightening observations that I’ve come across in Luther Askeland’s essay, “When the Word-Animal Discovers Signlessness: A Reflection on the Possibility of the Mystical,” which is available on Luther’s website. I’ve been reading a few pages of this lengthy essay every morning before I meditate. The first two…
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Posted inGod Miracles

A personal relationship with God, good or bad?

I continue to think about whether I even want a personal relationship with “God” (leaving that term suitably vague and undefined, per my churchless bent). As I observed recently, the idea that God is right by my side, watching everything that I do, is creepy and voyeuristic, similar to fears about what the Department of Homeland Security might become, except a lot more omnipresent and omniscient. Omnipotent too. Because most conceptions of a personal God presume that He/She/It can intervene in the affairs of the person with whom God has a personal relationship. This makes sense. How can you have…
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Posted inGod Radha Soami Satsang Beas

Is God really watching me?

The notion of a personal God who sees everything that we’re doing, and intervenes in our lives when He/She/It feels like it, seems increasingly strange to me. It just sounds too much like “Santa Claus is Coming to Town.” He’s…gonna find out who’s naughty and nice…He sees you when you’re sleeping. He knows when you’re awake. He knows if you’ve been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake! Also, for the sake of getting presents on Christmas Day. Just as believers in a personal God expect that they’ll be rewarded after death with salvation for being such a…
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Posted inGod Spiritual practice/meditation

God, go to hell

Cursing God is my response to Pat Robertson’s warning to Pennsylvania voters of divine wrath after they ejected a school board that ordered creationism lessons. Being scientifically minded, I feel that an experiment is in order: if there’s a God who gets ticked off just by creationism/intelligent design supporters being voted out of office, then he, she, or it should really become peeved at my telling him, her, or it to go to hell. So either me or whoever will inherit this Church of the Churchless blog (should I fail to survive this test) will let you know if anything…
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Posted inGod Spiritual practice/meditation

Nirguna and saguna, two visions of God

It may be a simplification to say, “There are two kinds of people in the world,” but often this seems to be true. Certainly it is with men and woman (leaving aside a few hermaphrodites) and I’m coming to believe that such is the case concerning our conceptions about God. Some people are attracted to the idea that God is beyond being, formless, inconceivable, pure mystery, unfathomable through our usual organs of cognition and perception. nirguna, to use a Hindu term. Others find this vision of God too distant, too detached, too abstract. They are drawn to a saguna divinity…
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Posted inGod

If God is mysterious, so are we

Most people accept that the nature of God is a mystery. But these same people believe that they understand the nature of themselves, the being who confidently declares “The nature of God is a mystery.” Yet what evidence is there that we are any less mysterious than God? Do we know our essence? Can we identify from where our acts of creation emanate? Are we justified in saying anything definitive about ourselves other than, as God said to Moses, “I am who I am”? These questions are sensitively explored by Luther Askeland in his essay, “Final Duties, Old Bones,” which…
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Posted inGod Politics

One nation under God?

It’s good to see that a federal judge has ruled that reciting the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools is unconstitutional, because it sure seems so to me. Since the pledge includes the words “under God,” how can anyone say that this isn’t a state-sponsored affirmation of religion? Probably the conservative-stacked Supreme Court will end up saying just that, of course. I won’t care much when this happens, since I don’t have strong feelings about this issue. However, I’d just as soon have the words “under God” stricken from the pledge, thereby getting it back to its godless pre-1954 state.…
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Posted inGod Religions

A churchless song: “When God Made Me”

Neil Young asks some great questions in his “When God Made Me” song that he performed last night at the televised Shelter from the Storm benefit for Hurricane Katrina victims. Through the magic of our digital video recorder I listened to the lyrics several times. They moved me. Young had a sort of gospel choir backing him up, but “When God Made Me” isn’t really a Christian song, in my opinion. It asks questions about God’s intentions, but doesn’t answer them. I liked that. Here’s an example: Was he planning only for believers, or for those who just had faith?…
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Posted inChristianity/Jesus God Morality

Talking with a churchless Christian

Last Tuesday I spent two pleasant hours talking with a Christian philosophy professor, Thomas Talbott. Tom teaches at Salem’s Willamette University. We were introduced by philosopher/artist/writer Patricia Herron, a friend who was instrumental in getting me thinking about this here Church of the Churchless back in August 2004. Pat, Tom, Don (a friend of Toms) and I got into lots of deep stuff during our conversation at the south Salem Beanery. Though my neurons were flying on the caffeinated wings of a grande vanilla latte, I really didn’t need any artificial stimulation to stay focused on the fascinating topics that…
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Posted inGod Spiritual practice/meditation

God, can you hear me now?

It’s amazing how many people believe that God hears their prayers. Have they ever gotten a clear-cut, unambiguous, no-doubt-about-it confirmation message back from God? “Got your call. Will take request under consideration.” After I buy something from Amazon I get an almost instant email response. That way I know that the order I sent off through the electronic maze of the Internet has reached the right place and my material desire soon will be delivered to my doorstep. I’ve never gotten the same courtesy from God. Kind of makes me wonder if my calls are getting through. The “Can you…
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