Posted inGod Reality

Best statement about reality, in just thirteen words

Back in 2006, I called my post about it "The best one-sentence metaphysics ever written." I still feel that way. But if anyone has another contender for this honor, share it in a comment. Dick's adage came to mind today when I gave some thought to another quotation by Gregory Bateson that I see mentioned fairly often in science books. Information is a difference which makes a difference. So let's ponder the notion of "God" a bit from the perspectives of what Dick and Bateson said. Or, if you like, of supernatural religiosity in general. What difference does the divinity so…
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Posted inGod

It’s stupid to say “God is everything”

Everything is God. God is all there is. As soon as I got to those words in a piece I came across, "Why Your Version of God is the Right One...for YOU," I knew that I'd disagree with the rest of the article. Download Why Your Version of God is the Right One…for YOU – Fractal Enlightenment It's meaningless to say God is everything. That's the same as saying God is nothing. If there is no way to distinguish something called "God" from everything else in existence, then God doesn't exist. Just call everything by a more accurate name. Here's…
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Posted inBooks God

Halfway through “Atheist Mind, Humanist Heart,” I love this book

With Christmas just a couple of weeks away, it's time to start thinking about what to get your atheist friend who, of course, doesn't believe in Christ (but still enjoys giving and receiving presents). Here's a book idea: Atheist Mind, Humanist Heart: Rewriting the Ten Commandments for the Twenty-first Century, by Lex Bayer and John Figdor.  Yeah, it's a bit spendy, even in the Kindle version. That didn't stop me from getting a copy, though, because I was fortunate to get a free one from a publicist who thought churchless me would enjoy the book and write a review of…
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Posted inChristianity/Jesus God

Believing in God is hard work (since God isn’t real)

Thanks to a David Chapman tweet, I came across an academic article about religious belief. Interesting stuff. Below I've chosen some excerpts from Pascal Boyer's piece which capture, pretty much, the gist of his commentary on another scholar's book, "When God Talks Back." Since for many years I was a member of an India-based organization, led by a guru, which believed it was possible to communicate with God in a supernatural fashion, I was intrigued by how similar the basic process used by Christian evangelicals is -- when they try to convert their "reflective" beliefs into "intuitive" experiences of God's…
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Posted inGod

I don’t believe in God, but I am SO saved

I'm feeling pretty damn good about my afterlife. Mostly because I don't think I'll have one. So almost certainly I won't be feeling anything at all after I die, which takes away worries about what will happen. Notice that almost certainly, though. I'm open both to the possibility that my consciousness could survive bodily death, and God could be waiting to greet the soul I don't believe I have. In that event, no problem. I'm confident that my encounter with divinity will go just fine. Here's why I'm so sanguine. Nobody knows which sort of God, if any, exists. Broadly…
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Posted inGod Reality

Once God is gone, the world shines more brightly

I've flown both ways. For many years I Iooked upon the world through a conceptual prism where my belief in God, a being unseen and unknown, altered the perspective from which I saw things. Now, I do my best to cast off the filter of spiritual imaginings, desiring to view reality as clearly as possible as it is rather than how I'd like it to be. I've discovered something interesting: when I don't try to fashion the world into a place that it isn't, full of illusory ideas about salvation, divinity, soul, eternal existence, and such, what is turns out…
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Posted inGod Science

Who should be praised for Disneyland?

My daughter, following in her father's churchlesss footsteps, doesn't believe in God. Or other religious fantasies.  So it surprised her when my granddaughter, who is almost seven, popped up with this back-seat observation when they approached Disneyland recently. (They live in southern California.) "Praise God for Disneyland." "What do you mean?" my daughter replied. "I'm the one who is driving you to Disneyland. So praise your mother for taking you." My granddaughter thought for a while. "OK, then let's praise Walt Disney for Disneyland." That makes much more sense than praising God. But I can understand why my granddaughter said…
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Posted inGod

God said, “Open up a pot shop.” (I’m a believer now.)

As churchless as I am, after reading this TIME story I'm more open now to the possibility that God exists. Or at least, that I could worship God. The idea for merging marijuana and ministry came through prayer, the couple said during testimony. They had been exposed to medical marijuana when a doctor recommended Lanette Davies’ daughter use it to alleviate symptoms from a bone disease and it “made her life livable,” she said. Bryan Davies became a convert after finding it helped ease an arthritic condition that affects his spine. Trying to live on Social Security benefits and short on cash,…
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Posted inGod Religions

Subjective sensations don’t make souls, just people

The title of this post comes from a passage I liked a lot in Adam Gopnik's terrific New Yorker piece, Bigger Than Phil: When did faith start to fade? “Cosmically, I seem to be of two minds,” John Updike wrote, a decade ago. “The power of materialist science to explain everything—from the behavior of the galaxies to that of molecules, atoms, and their sub-microscopic components—seems to be inarguable and the principal glory of the modern mind. "On the other hand, the reality of subjective sensations, desires, and—may we even say—illusions composes the basic substance of our existence, and religion alone,…
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Posted inGod

Give me one good reason to believe in God

Come on, religious believers. I'm asking. No, begging. What is One Good Reason I should believe in God? (I'm  capitalizing those three words to show how serious I am about wanting to know.) Believe me, I've considered all the reasons for believing. Including, for many years, not needing any reason at all except faith. That was good enough for me back then. Not now. I love reality too much to keep on believing in God. I doubt whether anyone can come up with a new One Good Reason that makes any more sense than the reasons that have been debated,…
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Posted inGod Religions

Religious believers, what if you’re wrong?

I"ve mused about this subject before, including in "You're religious, but are you right?" and "Anti-Pascal's wager bets on life." The question is: what if religious believers are wrong about God, afterlife, ultimate reality? Usually the consequences of being wrong are thrown in the face of atheists and infidels. You'll spend eternity in hell if you're wrong! So you should believe. Running the risk of sacrificing eternal joy for transient earthly pleasure is stupid. Well, not really.  It comes down to probabilities. As I've noted before, the existence or non-existence of God isn't a 50-50 proposition. Virtually all of the demonstrable…
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Posted inGod Science

God is as real as human consciousness

Below is a highly persuasive answer to the question, "Is God real?" I like the answer a lot, mostly because it is the answer I would have given to the question if I was as neuroscientifically wise as Michael Graziano, author of "Consciousness and the Social Brain," a book I've blogged about here and here. (Check out my Amazon review of the book.) Near the end of his book, Graziano asks Does God Exist? Here's extended quotes from that section. Graziano is such a good writer and thinker, I'm wary of paraphrasing this Professor of Neuroscience at Princeton University. Across all…
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Posted inGod Spiritual practice/meditation

We can feel soulful…without a soul

I enjoy feeling spiritual. But I don't believe in spirit any more. I know what it's like to be soulful. But I don't believe in soul any more. I like to talk to God. But I don't believe in God any more. I'm not crazy. Nor at odds with myself. Nor out of touch with reality. I'm just a normal human being, living a normal human life.  As noted in my previous post, the brains of Homo sapiens' have come up with all kinds of amazing concepts. We are creative thinkers. Unlike other mammals (so far as is known), people…
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Posted inGod Reality

Praying to a personal God requires us to be a “person”

I'm not big on praying. A few days ago I called it absurd, even in the face of tragedy. Prayers alone have zero effect on anything or anyone. Prayers plus action to change things... that can work. Philosophically, though, praying raises some interesting questions.  Is the entity being prayed to a personal being, or not? Usually we assume that it is, for good reason. Impersonal entities, like a stone, gravity, or a computer, aren't considered to be capable of responding to prayers.  (Nonetheless, I've engaged in quite of bit of dialoguing with computers over the years; particularly Windows machines where…
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Posted inGod

Oklahoma tornado tragedy shows absurdity of prayer

I understand why people pray. I've done a lot of praying myself. It's a natural reaction to appeal to a higher power when a loved one is seriously ill, lives are in danger, or some other unwanted event begs for divine intervention. But while the motivation for prayer is utterly human, so is prayer itself. Almost certainly there is no God watching over us, listening to pleas for this and that, deciding which to grant and which to ignore. I'm thankful for this. Because it would be worse if actually there were a God to pray to, a supernatural being…
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Posted inBooks God

If God doesn’t exist, do we still need to believe in “God”?

I love to get free books. One of the benefits of being an active churchless blogger is getting review copies of books in the "spiritual but not religious" genre.  I'm about a third of the way through Galen Guengerich's "God Revised: How Religion Must Evolve in a Scientific Age." I like the title, and I''m liking the book -- though this isn't really a review, since I've still got most of the book to read. Today I reached one of Galen Guengerich's core theses in the "What's Divine" chapter (he's the senior minister of All Souls Unitarian Church in Manhattan).  A central…
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Posted inGod Personal/Stories Spiritual practice/meditation

A cup of coffee is more real than God. Drink up!

There's so much to like about reality. It's got real stuff in it. Way cool. This is what makes living so satisfying. And so frustrating. Yet always interesting. We bump into real stuff that isn't us.  Maybe that bump is with an attractive sexual partner. Maybe it is with a mountain whose steep slopes challenge our climbing skills. Maybe it is with sitting still on a meditation cushion, aware of air going in and out of our nose. Maybe it is with cancer cells that have invaded our body. There's no end to the variety of encounters with physical reality.…
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Posted inGod

Do you believe that God exists? 100%? Absolutely? No doubts?

Usually on this blog I say what I think, and other people comment. Tonight I'm going to do something different.  I want to ask you, whoever you are, whoever might read this post, whether you are absolutely confident that God exists.  Meaning, you don't just believe, hope, suspect, hypothesize, have faith that God exists. You're sure. And not just pretty sure. You're 100% sure. You've got no doubts about the reality of God. If that describes you, leave a comment on this post. Explain the reasons for your absolute surety about God's existence. And while you're at it, tell us…
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Posted inGod

If rape and life is God’s will, why isn’t everything?

In addition to increasing the chance that Democrats will maintain control of the United States Senate by winning an open seat in Indiana, Republican senatorial candidate Richard Mourdock opened up an interesting line of theological questioning with his instantly infamous rape comment. In a Senate debate Tuesday night, Richard Mourdock, the Indiana state treasurer, tried to distinguish himself from two opponents who also oppose abortion, explaining why he does not accept an exception for pregnancies conceived by rape. “I’ve struggled with it myself for a long time, but I came to realize that life is that gift from God,” Mr. Mourdock said. “And…
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