Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas Reality Religions

What’s wrong with faith?

I’m often asked, generally by myself, “What’s wrong with faith? Doesn’t faith help us get through tough times and feel positive about the future?” Here’s how I answer, generally to myself: “Faith is fine when it points toward objective reality. But when faith keeps us revolving in the merry-go-round of subjective conceptions, it’s dangerous and should be discarded." Never passing up an opportunity to quote myself, this is how I discussed the issue in my book, “Return to the One”: The scientific method, by and large, is founded on the first assumption [“I’ll believe it when I see it”]: what…
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Posted inReality Religions Science

Knowledge, belief, and feathered dinosaurs

Let’s say you believe in creationism or “intelligent design,” as creationists now like to call their addled explanation of how living beings came to be. You don’t accept evolution. Everything was created all at once by a supreme being that knew exactly what he/she/it wanted to do and did it just right the first time around. Then you are confronted with solid evidence of feathered dinosaurs—a fossil dinosaur covered head to tail with downy fluff and primitive feathers. Evolutionary theory predicted that birds evolved from dinosaurs and, ta-da!, the hypothesis has been confirmed. As paleontologist Mark Norell says, “Dinosaurs are…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas Reality Spiritual practice/meditation

All masters but one are false

I’ve followed just two masters in my life. Of course, if “master” is taken in the broader biblical sense (“No man can serve two masters…You cannot serve God and wealth”) then I’ve had lots of masters. Everything that has led me in a direction in which I didn’t really want to go has mastered me. If I started to list all those things, this post would go on…and on…and on. So I’m not talking about those masters of me, just the two spiritual “gurus” that I pledged allegiance to sequentially several years apart. I believe that one was much more…
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Posted inReality

Reality is shades of gray

Isn’t it interesting how much we like to divide reality into halves? Black and white, liberal and conservative, rich and poor, red states and blue states, pro-life and pro-choice, masculine and feminine, heaven and hell. Can it really be that there are only two choices in so many areas of existence? No. Life in all of its complex, mystifying, aggravating variety is truly shades of gray, not black and white. Diane Ackerman, naturalist and poet, speaks of our fondness for artificial “twosies” in her book “An Alchemy of Mind.” She is addressing the question of whether nature or nurture explains…
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Posted inBooks God Mystics

Plotinus: Vision

For more than eight years I’ve been a close friend of a long-dead Greek philosopher, Plotinus. Obviously I haven’t sat down and talked with him directly, but I feel like I have, so intensely and intimately have I studied his teachings in the course of writing a book: “Return to the One: Plotinus’s Guide to God-Realization.” Plotinus is the last of five mystics that I’ve been writing about. Each is a worthy “patron saint” for the churchless, and each exhibits a special quality that I try to describe in a single word. For Plotinus it is vision. I’ve read countless…
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Posted inGod Reality Religions

Why bad tsunamis happen to good people

“Why?” is a many-faceted word when it comes to disasters. Science can tell us the physical reasons why the tsunami hit South and Southeast Asia, but people in the area (and elsewhere) also want answers to broader questions: Why us? Why here? Why now? These are queries in an article by Kenneth Wordward in the January 10 issue of Newsweek: “Countless Souls Cry Out to God.” The article describes how survivors of four faiths, Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, and Christianity, are variously conceiving the metaphysical meaning of the tsunami cataclysm. The Hindu inhabitants of poor fishing communities don’t have sophisticated theological…
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Posted inReality Religions Science

Reality is the best religion

Is religion isn’t real, what good is it? Not much. Admittedly, believing in something that isn’t real can make you feel better and offer consolation when life is tough. It is easier to accept a tragedy if this is taken to be “God’s will.” And instead of feeling powerless to change an unfortunate situation, many people embrace prayer as a way to call a higher power into action. Similarly, children ask Santa Claus to bring them presents from the North Pole. They also put newly lost baby teeth under their pillows and expect that the Tooth Fairy will reward them.…
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