God

This morning, while I was meditating, a thought popped into my mind: What's good about God? After a bit of reflection, an answer came: Nothing.If you're an atheist or agnostic, that answer won't surprise you. But I hope to convince religious believers that they too should consider that God is good for nothing. In fact, I don't see how someone could come to any other conclusion.Follow my reasoning...God isn't evident. People are. Religions are founded by people who supposedly know something about God. For example, Jesus, Mohammad, Moses. In addition to these historical figures, there are modern day gurus, masters,…

Thanks to Pharyngula, I've got a better understanding of the neurological and psychological reasons people believe in gods. (And it isn't because God is real, that's for sure.)The preceding link will lead you to a 54 minute You Tube video by Andy Thompson, a psychiatrist who is knowledgeable about how our evolutionary origins are reflected in modern psyches. I'll also embed the video at the end of this post. I watched/listened to it in pieces over the past few days, turning the volume up on my laptop as I made a meal in the kitchen. Here's a couple of my…

Fairly frequently I hear from true believers who ask me, in so many words, "Brian, how could you?" Almost always my reply is "There's no way I couldn't."Meaning, my nearly lifelong search for the way things really are necessitates leaving aside the way things aren't. The fancy philosophical term for this is Via Negativa, the negative way.In negative theology, it is accepted that the Divine is ineffable, an abstract experience that can only be recognized—that is, human beings cannot describe the essence of God, and therefore all descriptions if attempted will be ultimately false and conceptualization should be avoided.Religions love…

Dear God, deliver me from New Agey, Ken Wilber'ish, pseudo-evolutionary, integral philosophy B.S. like what just popped into my email inbox, courtesy of Andrew Cohen and his EnlightenNext crew. I just said that I had mixed feelings about Ken Wilber. Cohen's YouTube video adds quite a bit of weight to the absurd side of my attitude. If you've got eight minutes you want to waste, take a look. I can see why Cohen changed the name of his magazine from "What is Enlightenment?" Because talk like I heard on the video sure would earn a big fat "Not this!" from…

I've been spending a lot of time recently staring at computer or television screens that show the current depressing state of the United States stock market, which reflects a global financial crisis. I'm not a masochist. I just find this whole meltdown fascinating on all sorts of levels: personal, societal, philosophical. My core emotional reaction to the 40% decline in the Dow Jones Industrial Average this year has mirrored my descent into churchlessness. At first, I felt uncomfortable. But now I'm feeling a sort of strange bliss that's akin to the sensation of being strapped into a roller coaster. All…

Big topic: why God doesn't exist. And an uncomfortable one, for most people. So I'll ease into it, before doing my best to burst some believing bubbles. I experienced a quasi-miracle this morning. "Quasi," because it really wasn't one. But to someone religious what happened to me would be nothing short of miraculous. Aside from the fact that the miracle pointed to no-God. A few days ago I wrote about multiple universes and my newly founded Church of Holy Fuck! Because that's what I say when I ponder the notion of many me's (and you's) populating the infinite cosmos. I…

Like most people, I've got an affinity for one. It just seems so much more, well, together than two. Plus, nobody chants "We're #2! We're #2!" Or intones, "May we all realize our twoness." Back when I was researching and writing a book about Plotinus, a Greek mystic philosopher, I spent a couple of years immersed in thoughts about oneness . After all, the title of the book is "Return to the One." So some new comments on a well-commented older post caught my eye today. Adam said: Tuscon,you wrongly write:"Philosophies like Sant Mat...are dualistic." Sant Mat states that the…

Pascal's Wager frequently is held up as a reason to believe in God. As I noted in a previous post ("You're religious, but are you right?"), Pascal argued that it's best to gamble on belief. There are four possible outcomes to the wager: (1) You believe in God and God exists, (2) You believe in God and God doesn't exist, (3) You don't believe in God and God exists, (4) You don't believe in God and God doesn't exist. Pascal held that the best and worst outcomes are (1) and (3) in which God exists. Then, a belief in God…

When I'm not being grandiose and am feeling my normal humble self, I like to imagine how God sees things. This isn't difficult for me to do – it's easy really – because after almost forty years of daily meditation my ego loss is so nearly complete, I'm in touch with the highest realms of reality. (Just don't ask my wife to confirm this. Unfortunately, she still denies my divinity. But isn't there some sort of saying about a prophet not being recognized in his own land? Or…home?) Anyway, I've been pondering why God would love me and other churchless…

Perfection and God are two words that go hand in hand. Most people feel that an imperfect God would be no God at all. Some of the qualities usually associated with divinity are omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence, omnibenevolence. Well, if a being was all-powerful, all-knowing, present everywhere, and had love for everyone and everything, I can see why this entity would be deserving of being called perfect. But why does "God," which I use as a synonym for ultimate reality, have to be perfect? What's perfect about perfection? I got thinking about this when I came to the first page (p.…

Oh, my God! I'm absolutely loving "The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality." So much so, this morning I finished it, fueled by a strong cup of pre-meditation coffee and the joy of reading good writing. As I said before, Andre Comte-Sponville has a wonderful approach to spirituality. I started to say "in spite of the fact that he's a philosophy professor," but there's no spite involved here. Comte-Sponville's book springs as much from his life experience as his philosophical experience (assuming there's a difference between life and philosophy, which, really, there isn't – living includes everything). There's so much that…

Lots of people believe that God can manifest in a human form. So, why not yours or mine? Speaking for myself (though if I'm God, I'm really speaking for everybody), I'm hugely attracted to the notion that I'm worthy of worship. Unfortunately, other people aren't as attuned to my potential divinity. Notably, my wife. For eighteen years I've been trying to convince her that the way I load the dishwasher is The Way It Should Be, by divine decree. For some reason she can't recognize my husbandly perfection. So today I was excited to see a post on the Radhasoami…

Main difference: jellyfish are real. I'm so certain of this, today I sat for two hours on Maui's Napili Beach, watching terrific large boogie boardable waves from the sand, passing them by because of jellyfish warning signs that had been posted. Having just invested a lot of time in pondering jellyfish, much more than I've ever done before, I've been trying to fathom what cosmic significance this dangerous sea creature (whose sting toxin supposedly is seventy-five percent as powerful as cobra venom) has for my spiritual development. Assuming it has any at all. But it's no fun to go the…

Last week I got a present: an email from someone who attached a wonderfully written essay, "The Mystical Mind of God." I asked for permission to share it. Whatever you wish, came the reply, though please, if you do decide to do something, leave no footprints to my door. So the author is anonymous. Here's the piece in Word and PDF formats. It's thoughtful and well worth reading. Download the_mystical_mind_of_god.doc Download the_mystical_mind_of_god.pdf I enjoyed… --the emphasis on Western mystics and thinkers, who tend to get short shrift in mystically-inclined writings --how the author weaves together insights from theology, philosophy, psychology,…

Fairly frequently people question, Why this Church of the Churchless blog? I've got an email in my "to reply" file that asks just this. Why be critical of religion? Why discuss the believability of theological tenets, including those of the group to which I belonged for thirty years, Radha Soami Satsang Beas? Why place articles of faith under the looking glass of reality? Because truth is worthy of veneration. Now, some people consider that there is no such thing as objective truth, that reality is whatever we consider it to be. There's, well, some truth to this. But you see…

I've managed to only read the dreadful "Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus" piece a few times in my 59 years. It pops up each Christmas day in every newspaper that I've subscribed to. I notice it, but rush on to more important stuff – like the comics and sports page. Today I decided to see if I could read this response to an eight year old girl, first published in the New York Sun in 1897, without getting sick to my churchless stomach. I suspected that this syrupy drivel wouldn't go down so well now that I've become…

I wish this would happen – competent, professional, skilled intelligence analysts sitting around a table, sifting through factual evidence for the existence of God, in the same fashion as was done recently with the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) concerning Iran's nuclear weapons program. I'd love to be able to listen to the discussion. And see what evidence would be considered worthy of supporting a "Yes, God exists" assessment. It'd be slim to non-existent, for sure. Just as the evidence for Iraq having weapons of mass destruction was. Yet the United States intelligence community got that wrong. So why should anybody…

I'm still trying to get my head around the main message of a book that I'm reading: God is in the brain. And not just "God," whatever this famously fuzzy word means, but also every form of religious, spiritual, or mystical experience. This shouldn't be a big surprise, to me or anybody else. Yet the more I dig into The Mystical Mind, by Eugene d'Aquili and Andrew Newberg, the more I'm having to re-examine some deeply held and largely unconscious beliefs. Like, the notion that when I'm meditating, something marvelously mysterious is going on. Or, at least, could go on…

Ah, it feels great to have my faithlessness freshened. Thanks to God is Imaginary, I've been able to browse through cleansing pools of skepticism – proofs (some more persuasive than others) that the Big Guy Upstairs is a figment of religious imagination. The ones I looked at resonated with me. Proof #11 -Notice that there is no scientific evidence is something I've pondered a lot. It goes along with Proof #43 - Realize that a "hidden God" is impossible. Impossible for a Christian-sort of religion that posits a personal divinity who's interested in us, at least. For if God wants…

I'm a long ways – a very long ways – from sharing Albert Einstein's understanding of the universe. But when it comes to Einstein's religious bent, we're almost soul brothers. Just as, I suspect, many other churchless people are. As described in a TIME article, "Einstein and Faith," in 1930 Einstein wrote a credo called "What I Believe." It ended with this oft-quoted passage about what he meant when he called himself religious. The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of all true art and science. He…