Posted inMeaning of life Morality

Two deeply flawed heads of state on a red carpet. Truly, life lacks inherent meaning.

Ladies and gentlemen of the Philosophical Jury. Regarding the question of whether there is meaning, morality, and justice inherent in life, I present into evidence this photograph of two men walking on a red carpet prior to their meeting yesterday in Anchorage, Alaska, where they discussed how to end the war in Ukraine. There are those who argue that life is fair, that we get what we deserve, that what goes around comes around. I beg to differ. For the man on the right is Vladimir Putin, Russia's dictator, though his official title is something less honest. Putin kills his…
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Posted inFree will Morality Neuroscience

Evil doesn’t exist. It’s just a word used to describe bad behavior.

We humans love abstract concepts. As we should. For no other species has anywhere near our capability for language and conceptualization, both of which are needed to come up with abstract notions like freedom, justice, love, evil.  None of those words point to anything concrete, something that can be put on a table and studied as we would a starfish, piece of marble, or hummingbird. They're purely human inventions with no connection to the natural world. It's easy to forget this, though. Just as "God" has come to mean something real and important for billions of people without any substantial…
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Posted inMorality Neuroscience

Perplexed by Nazi behavior at Auschwitz, I get some clues in the Selfless book

This morning I watched a recorded episode of 60 Minutes while doing my stretching and flexibility exercises. It was about the discovery of a photo album that belonged to a Nazi officer who took part in the horrendous killing of 1.1 million people at Auschwitz, about a million of whom were Jews. You can see the episode via this You Tube video. The photo album mostly showed the everyday side of living at Auschwitz from the German perspective. Several photos showed a Nazi shaking hands with his dog, just as many dog-owners do. There were pictures of smiling Germans listening…
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Posted inMorality

Reaction to Biden’s cancer diagnosis shows power of empathy and compassion

Today the news broke that Joe Biden, the former president of the United States, has a serious variety of prostate cancer.  Former President Joe Biden has been diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer, with metastasis to the bone, according to a statement from his personal office Sunday. Doctors diagnosed Biden last week with a prostate nodule after he experienced increasing urinary symptoms. By Friday, they diagnosed him with cancer. Biden’s office said the cancer “appears to be hormone-sensitive which allows for effective management.” A spokesperson said in a statement that the 82-year-old Biden and his family are reviewing…
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Posted inMorality Politics

Academy Awards speech about Palestinian suffering shows power of compassion

Having just spent much of my evening watching the Academy Awards (thankfully, I recorded the show, so could skip the commercials and boring parts, as it ran for three hours and forty-five minutes), I had been planning to write something short on a different subject for this blog. That plan changed when I saw the acceptance speech for Best Documentary, which went to "No Other Land," a film about the destruction of a Palestinian village in the West Bank by the Israeli military. The men who gave the acceptance speech were Palestinian co-director Basel Adra and Israeli co-director  Yuval Abraham.…
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Posted inMorality Politics

Empathy is a sign of maturity, which is why Trump is so childlike

It's difficult to define morality, or for that matter, to define any other characteristic that most people would agree is part of being a decent human being. But that shouldn't stop us from speaking about morality, since common sense and intuition are a pretty good guide here. In the February 2025 issue of Scientific American, there's an article about how the adolescent mind develops, "Growing the Adolescent Mind."  The geeky details are interesting. However, what caught my eye was the mention of transcendence, which I usually think of as referring to something in the religious or spiritual sphere. After all,…
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Posted inMorality Politics

Germany surviving Hitler doesn’t reassure me about Trump

I don't believe that evil exists. At least, not in the way that word typically is used, as someone or something with wholly negative qualities that border, if not actually inhabit, a dualistic metaphysical realm where Good is inherently opposed to Evil as opposite cosmic forces.   I do believe that sometimes people do really bad things. Not because they are evil. Because they are people with both the capability and the intention to do those bad things.  Murder. Rape. Torture. Whether those who carry out horrendous acts like these do so of their free will, or via deterministic causes,…
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Posted inMorality Radha Soami Satsang Beas

I prefer honest sinners to deceptive saints

Let's be clear. I don't believe in the notion of sin, which is an offense against God. That's ridiculous, since there's no persuasive evidence that God even exists, nor, obviously, that anyone knows what the nonexistent God likes and doesn't like. I also don't believe in the notion of saints, who are believed to have a closeness to God, for the same reason. So when I refer to sinners and saints in the title of this post, I'm speaking in a secular sense of bad and good people -- where "bad" and "good" are actions or qualities that a certain…
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Posted inMorality

Morality has evolutionary roots, but goodness still feels like a choice

Recently someone complained in a comment on this blog that another person was leaving comments under their name. I was asked to do something about it. Problem is, that's hard to do, since my blogging service, unlike Facebook, doesn't have a way for a user to claim a distinct identity.  So if you're concerned about this happening to you, my advice is to always include the same email address when you post a comment. The email address only is visible to me, while your name is visible to everyone. Then if someone has appropriated your name, not innocently but to…
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Posted inMorality

Life is precious. So why do we humans value it so cheaply?

Us members of Homo sapiens like to consider that we're the peak of the evolutionary mountain. We're proud of our big brains, our unique ability to use language and abstract thought, our technological accomplishments, and, yes, our supposed evolved morality. Humanity has indeed made a lot of progress on the moral front. Slavery is condemned. So is racism. Women have equal rights in many, if not most countries. In democracies, everyone has an equal vote. Religious heresy doesn't lead to being burned at the stake. And yet, life still is not valued as much as it should be. There are…
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Posted inBuddhism Morality Spiritual practice/meditation

Tonglen seems like a good practice, if it is more than mental

Today I read a talk in Pema Chödrön's book, The Wisdom of No Escape, where she explained to her Buddhist retreat students what the practice of tonglen is all about -- something I'd never heard about before. I found a web page where Chödrön describes tonglen in the same way as she did in her book. Check out "How to Practice Tonglen." Here's an excerpt. Tonglen practice, also known as “taking and sending,” reverses our usual logic of avoiding suffering and seeking pleasure. In tonglen practice, we visualize taking in the pain of others with every in-breath and sending out…
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Posted inGay rights Morality

The beauty of “We don’t not care” rather than “We don’t care”

Sometimes a television program can get a moral point across in a few minutes of entertainment that is more clear and convincing than a lengthy ethical treatise. That happened to me last night when my wife and I were watching an episode of season 3 of Ted Lasso on AppleTV+. Before I share a clip of that scene, a bit of background.  Colin, one of the soccer (football, to most of the world) players on the professional team Lasso is coaching, inadvertently revealed that he was gay, homosexual, to the team captain, Isaac, when Isaac saw some photos on Colin's…
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Posted inMeaning of life Morality

My new favorite book: “Life is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way”

I've read countless (more or less) religious, spiritual, mystical, philosophical, and self-help books that basically take an optimistic approach to life. Yes, life is difficult, as the Buddha said. But those books say that it's possible to turn suffering into well- being through a myriad of suggested ways, many of them contradictory. Believe in God. Meditate. Find your true self. Flow with whatever happens. Have a positive attitude. Nothing wrong with all that. Except when it is. Yesterday Amazon delivered into my eagerly awaiting hands a book that Sam Harris recommended on Twitter: "Life is Hard," by Kieran Setiya, a…
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Posted inMorality

Good friends of mine prove that morality doesn’t require religion

Last night my wife and I attended a 61st anniversary celebration of a couple we've known for a long time, Russ and Delana Beaton.  When I got home, I wrote a blog post about the evening. Excerpt: Laurel, my wife, and I have known the Beatons for a long time, over 25 years. If there's one word that describes them, its nice. If you want two words, nice and caring. Going for three, nice and caring and competent.  After a moving slide show of their married life narrated in a poetic rhyming fashion by their children, other people spoke about…
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Posted inBuddhism Morality

Treat yourself like you would a friend: gently, kindly, compassionately

Loving-kindness meditation as I've learned it typically starts off with an "I" statement, then moves on to "you" and "all." As in May I be happy... May you be happy... May all be happy. Sometimes this rubs me the wrong way, as it seems egotistical to start off with an intention for my happiness, and only then visualize someone close to me (usually my wife) and all of humanity being happy. But given the way most people treat themselves, it does seem like it makes sense to extend loving-kindness to our own self before extending it to others. Often we're…
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Posted inMorality

Morality comes from evolution, not God

There are lots of reasons to reject religion. Here at the Church of the Churchless we've been pointing them out since 2004, proudly deconverting people from blind faith and dogma one non-soul at a time. One of those reasons is that contrary to what fundamentalists believe, morality, judging what is right and wrong, doesn't come from God or some other supernatural source. It's the result of evolution.  Browsing through an old issue of Scientific American that I found languishing in a drawer of magazines, a special September 2018 issue about The Science of Being Human included an article by Michael…
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Posted inMorality Politics

Leaked Supreme Court opinion shows abortion rights about to be overturned

Christian fundamentalists in the United States are happy right now. Today Politico reported that a leaked draft Supreme Court opinion indicates that Roe v. Wade, which found a constitutional right to abortion in that 1973 case, is about to be overturned. The Supreme Court has voted to strike down the landmark Roe v. Wadedecision, according to an initial draft majority opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito circulated inside the court and obtained by POLITICO. The draft opinion is a full-throated, unflinching repudiation of the 1973 decision which guaranteed federal constitutional protections of abortion rights and a subsequent 1992 decision –…
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Posted inMorality

War crimes in Bucha show depravity of Russia

Religious believers have a lot of trouble explaining evil. How could a loving God allow people to suffer so much at the hands of their fellow humans?  The usual unpersuasive religious bullshit is trotted out. God works in mysterious ways. God allows humans to have free will, even if they freely will cruelty. Karmic connections from past lives cause some people to harm others in a settling of karmic accounts. I don't accept any of that. People do terrible things because some people are terrible. Sure, there may be psychological reasons for their horrible behavior. But this doesn't excuse horrors…
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Posted inMeaning of life Morality

What do you find inspiring about Ukrainians?

I'm curious. While I realize that most of the people who visit this blog aren't as obsessed with the Russian invasion of Ukraine as I am -- I check my Twitter feed for recent news about Ukraine many times a day -- likely everybody is at least somewhat familiar with how bravely the Ukrainian people are fighting against this unprovoked war by Vladimir Putin. So I'm interested in learning how you feel about what's happening in Ukraine. Note, feel. I stress that word because while I do a lot of thinking about Ukraine, all those thoughts aren't nearly as important…
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Posted inAlan Watts Morality

Morality, like Alan Watts, is in the eye of the beholder

It's been interesting to see the various reactions of regular readers of this blog to my series of posts about Alan Watts, especially my recent post about how "Alan Watts was true to his moral philosophy."  Those like me who agree with how Watts viewed reality -- as a self-organizing whole without any top-down commander like God -- tended to view his personal life as irrelevant to his philosophizing, which leaned in his later years toward Chinese/Taoist perspectives. Not surprisingly, those who disagreed with how Watts saw things seized upon his three marriages, affairs with other women, drug use, and…
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