Posted inBuddhism Personal/Stories

My Zen snow globe

BEHOLD... my mystical magical enlightening Zen snow globe! You turn it over to stir things up, then it settles down. Until things get stirred up again, after which they settle down. Just like life.
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Posted inPersonal/Stories Radha Soami Satsang Beas

My definitive answer to why I left Radha Soami Satsang Beas

Geez, I thought, when I read the comment. Another one!  I have no idea why so many people are so interested in why, after 35 years, I deconverted from being a follower of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), which is headed by a guru devotees consider to be God in human form. But here's the comment by the somewhat weirdly named "Guru." Naturally my second thought was, No way am I going to pick only one option or reply in one sentence. Instead, I'll use this blog post to convey what I hope is the definitive answer to why I…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories

Each of us is much more than our religious beliefs (or lack thereof)

Many things amuse me when I peruse comments on this Church of the Churchless blog by religiously-minded people. One class of comments that generates an especially large smile is Brian, you spend all of your time bashing religion, so you're obviously obsessed.  When I see someone saying this, I know that just as they're prone to drawing inaccurate conclusions about the cosmos from biased beliefs, they also draw false conclusions about me from a very limited body of evidence -- my posts on this blog.  Actually, almost everybody is a complex mix of varied interests that include much more than…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories

Here’s my 12 favorite churchless blog posts of 2018

Why, this is almost like the Twelve Days of Christmas -- aside from the Days and Christmas part. It's my Twelve Favorite Blog Posts of 2018 here on the Church of the Churchless. (Image below came from here.) I picked one post from each month, because that was easier. And I generally chose posts that I'd written mostly by myself, rather than posts where I quoted a lot from someone else. But since rules are made to be broken, a few posts don't contain mostly my own words. So here they are, the decidedly non-sacred Twelve Favorite Blog Posts of…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories

Here’s our irreligious 2018 Hines Christmas letter

Trigger alert: if you're religious or conservative (i.e. a Donald Trump lover), or worse, religious and conservative, you may find the 2018 Christmas letter fashioned by my wife and me -- well, actually, just me -- to be not your cup of Holiday tea. Anyway, here it is in all its semi-dark glory. Enjoy.  And Merry Christmas to all, churchless of the world and religious believers of the world alike. Deep down, there's more that binds us than what divides us, even though this is difficult to discern if you spend a lot of time on Facebook, or watch cable…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories

Tomorrow I’ll be 70. Tonight I wrote a blog post about what I’ve learned.

It freaks me out to think that tomorrow I'll be 70. So tonight I rummaged though my aging brain, looking for some (possible) wisdom to share with a (possible) waiting world. I came up with this post that I wrote for my HinesSight blog: "Regret and hope are luxuries for the young."  Hey, at least the title sounds kind of philosophically profound. I readily admit my "live for the moment" advice is cliched. But sometimes cliches are wonderfully true. Here's an excerpt from the post: In fact, I'm becoming increasingly convinced that after a certain age, and I feel that I've…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories Radha Soami Satsang Beas Spiritual practice/meditation

A pleasing message about me, and honesty about RSSB

Some people like this blog. Some people don't like it. After 14 years of regularly writing here on the Church of the Churchless, I've come to expect both praise and criticism.  Not surprisingly, I prefer hearing good things about me and this blog. So when I got the following email message today from someone in India I've been corresponding with, it made me feel good.  I'll explain why after the message. I've corrected some typos and made the formatting easier to read. Otherwise the message is as written. "Sewa" means service, or volunteer work. The Dera is the Indian headquarters…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories

My death is prematurely celebrated

This is one of the pleasures of blogging -- being celebrated. Since I'm writing a blog post about this comment, obviously the commenter was celebrating prematurely. Naturally I was curious about where my fan lives, so I looked up the IP address of the commenter. It came from the Punjab, in India.  Nice! I'm being celebrated from halfway around the world! The meaning of this pithy comment is open to discussion, of course. Another commenter was a bit generous in this regard, given the historical comparisons, but I did agree with the remark about the need for us to connect…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories Radha Soami Satsang Beas

Here’s the truth about when I started criticizing RSSB

Falsehoods bother me. Including falsehoods about me. Like the completely unfounded rumor that I started criticizing Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), the Indian spiritual group I belonged to for 35 years, after I was fired as a speaker at meetings of the group. I've noticed this falsehood popping up in recent comments on this blog, most recently from "manjit." Like so many religious believers, "manjit" is repeating a conjecture that isn't correct, but since it feels good to spout it, it gets spouted. Well, here's some truth-telling. I've shared it before in comments, but I wanted to write a blog…
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Posted inComments Personal/Stories

Nasty criticisms of me from some “spiritual” RSSB defenders

I find it entertaining to see how supposedly "spiritual" followers of Radha Soami Satsang Beas, the Indian organization headed up by a guru that I was a member of for 35 years, can write such wonderfully insulting comments about me. I'm sharing some recent comments below, along with my response in italics. These are great comments -- don't get me wrong about that -- but they pale in vehemence, profanity, and stream of consciousness verbosity to comments I've received previously and published on my I Hate Church of the Churchless blog. ------------------------------------------ Believer in Humanity said: Brian Hines is the most…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories

Praise for me and the Church of the Churchless feels good

Recently I got a message from a Church of the Churchless visitor that moved me a lot. Even brought some tears to my eyes. I spent some time wondering about whether I should share parts of the message, since it could strike some as egotistical if I did this. But here's why you can read most of the message below. (I left out a few overly personal parts.) We all like to feel like we've made a difference to the world, that we've impacted other people in a positive way. I was talking about this a few days ago, when…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories

I’ve got a new non-religious “mantra”

I don't believe in mantras any more, having found the wisdom to deconvert from an Indian philosophy that espoused repeating some supposedly holy words silently in one's head not only during meditation, but as much as possible throughout the day. Looking back, this was a ridiculous thing to do.  A mantra essentially mesmerizes the brain, distracting the repeater of a mantra from being fully aware of what is happening both in the world outside and inside of them.  It's a way of denying reality. Often a mantra is believed to have some sort of supernatural power, which of course is…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories Reality

“Existence is entirely futile.” A brave essay on the human condition.

With the author's permission, here's a highly thoughtful, well-reasoned, nicely-written email message I received recently that presents a stark, but persuasive, perspective on the human condition.  I enjoyed reading about what led this person to change from a hopeful spiritual person to a nihilistic atheist. The message ended with an invitation to me to comment on it, which I was pleased to do -- which led to some further thoughts from the message sender. I've shared an edited version of our interchange after the essay itself. Enjoy. And I mean that word, enjoy, because even though what follows will strike…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories

“Burner on!” episode shows danger in trusting our intuition

Many religiously-minded people put a lot of stock in feelings. Meaning, those intuitions that appear full-blown in the mind, seemingly from out of nowhere, that just seem So Absolutely True, they demand to be believed.  Like, God is love, Jesus is watching over me, and such. Well, last weekend I had an experience that calls into question the veracity of intuitions like that. It started with my Sunday morning habit of making pancakes for breakfast.  More accurately, one large pancake. Which I cook in a correspondingly large pan, that's heated by a large burner on our electric cooktop.  After eating…
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Posted inBooks Personal/Stories

“God’s Whisper, Creation’s Thunder” is back in print, shorter and simplified

Big news! Also, kind of weird news.  Now-atheist me has gotten a second edition of the book written by previous-religious-believer me back in print. It took me many years to do this after the initial publisher went of business, but I finally got around to it. (Note: the paperback version was available May 8 on Amazon, but it took this long for a Kindle version to be prepared, then linked to the paperback listing on Amazon.) Yes, Amazon has "God's Whisper, Creation's Thunder: Echoes of Spiritual Reality in the New Physics" available for $13 in paperback and $3.99 for the…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories Spiritual practice/meditation

How I’m content with an atheistic world view

Today I got an email message from someone who asked a great question about finding contentment with an atheistic world view. I dashed off a response right away, because I loved how this person described their quandary, and how clearly their youthful angst was expressed. Speaking of love, which the person said was their "entire meaning in life," you'll see that I didn't mention love in my reply. I thought about this only after I'd sent my response. It isn't that love isn't important to me, or that it isn't a big part of my life. I guess it is…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories

Taking a risk, like sky diving, can be a shortcut to mindfulness

There's nothing like doing something that could kill you to concentrate one's mind. Many years ago I remember reading an article in Parade magazine that contained a quote from an Iraq war veteran that said something similar: "Everybody needs something in their life that can kill them."  For three years, 2009 to 2012, I rode a maxi-scooter -- a Burgman 650 Executive. I loved it. (My wife, not so much, as noted in a blog post, "USA Today story about older motorcycle riders mentions...ME!") Riding the Burgman 650, as is the case with all motorcycles/scooters, focused my attention on the…
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Posted inGod Personal/Stories

My atheist interpretation of the Lord’s Prayer

Sometimes I feel like praying, even though I don't believe in God. The only prayer that I remember from my brief time in Catholicism as a child is the Lord's Prayer. So I enjoy interpreting the familiar words from a scientific atheist point of view.  Our Father who art in heaven, The laws of nature aren't bound by time and space, being both universal and responsible for the space-time continuum of our universe. These laws are our father, mother, sister, brother, and every other sort of familial relationship we might consider ourselves having with them. Hallowed be thy name. We humans…
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Posted inBooks Personal/Stories

Pay attention to the small things of life, because they’re the important things

Walking back to our rural home after a dog walk, I was struck by how a leafless oak tree at the edge of our yard looked against the late afternoon sky. It was a lesson in fractals, those amazing shapes that repeat at many levels. Each twig was a reflection of each branch which was a reflection of the entire tree. Which got me to thinking about how the small things in life are a reflection of the big things in life. To put it another way, the meaning we get from small things is the same meaning we get…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories

Here’s my darkly humorous irreligious 2017 Christmas letter

Old habits die hard. I still write a Christmas letter for my wife and me. Except we call it "Holiday Greetings."  Below is  the 2017 letter that I wrote last night. Oh, as long as I'm blogging... I'm not a strong law-and-order guy, so I'm not going to strictly enforce the commenting rule that I talked about in my previous blog post. I simply am hoping that Church of the Churchless commenters will keep preachiness to a minimum, and use the Open Thread for drastically off-topic comment conversations. Our Christmas letter can be viewed two ways: PDF: 2017 Laurel and…
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