Posted inAwareness Reality Spiritual practice/meditation

The best spiritual practice could be…nothing

Here's some thoughts about the value of basing your spiritual practice on... drumroll please... absolutely nothing. But I'll introduce this topic by sharing an anecdote. Yesterday I took our dog for a walk around the community lake near our rural property. A house is for sale that overlooks the lake. A woman and two children were walking down from the house toward the lake, seemingly because the family was looking into buying the house. A young boy came up to the fence that our dog and me were on the other side of. He pointed and said, "nice lake." Then…
49
Posted inReality Religions Science

Respect for facts is a great virtue

I'm a lover of facts. That's why I'm a hater of religion. Ah, but don't religions seek the truth? Not really. They claim to, but only in the sense that QAnon followers believe they're truth-seekers.  In each case, religion and QAnon, truth is viewed much more as a belief, as something they hope is the case, rather than as an aspect of objective reality. So facts are different from truth. There's lots of ways people define those two terms, as I learned by doing some Googling.  This article describes the difference quite clearly. A Fact and a Truth walk into…
13
Posted inReality Religions

Christmas is a good time to debunk all religious belief

Naturally Christianity comes to mind in December, since Christmas includes the word "Christ." But I view this time of year as an opportunity to remind myself, and others through this blog, of the absurdity of all religious belief.  Of course, it is only us atheists who look upon all religions as absurd. Since most people are religious, they view their faith as making good sense. It's those other religions that are absurd. To offer a few examples: -- Christians have no problem believing that Jesus was born of a virgin, walked on water, and came back from the dead. But…
13
Posted inReality Science

Reason rules with God’s will, karma, and laws of nature

Having written about reason and rationality recently, here's some thoughts that came to mind (weird phrase, since where else would thoughts appear?) as I was musing about how people believe in God's will and karma as other-worldly explanations for why things happen as they do. It struck me that God's will and karma are appealing notions for many because they provide reasons for happenings that often aren't pleasant. Or are surprising. For example, I know someone who got stage 4 lung cancer even though she never smoked. Thankfully, she's doing quite well, even after several years have passed since the…
9
Posted inBooks Reality Religions

Why people with religious delusions do fine in everyday life

I've finished Steven Pinker's book, Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters. I enjoyed it, though some chapters were a bit tedious. The final chapters, though, held my interest. Here's what I liked most in the next to last chapter, "What's Wrong With People?" Meaning, why do so many people believe such crazy irrational stuff? It starts off with a great George Carlin quote. Tell people there's an invisible man in the sky who created the universe, and the vast majority will believe you. Tell them the paint is wet, and they have to touch it…
2
Posted inReality Science

The chance that you know something others don’t is very small

After over fifty years of pursuing spirituality in one form or another, I've come to one firm conclusion. I'm nothing special. And neither are you. Nor is anybody else. Now, I'm not saying that everybody is the same. Obviously every person is different. We all have different thoughts, emotions, talents, likes and dislikes, appearance, and so on. What I mean is that we're all material beings living in this material world, to sort of quote Madonna.  So whatever we know about the world, almost certainly other people possess the same knowledge. Most of us like to think that in some…
24
Posted inBooks Delusions Reality

Presumptions are necessary for reasoning to work

Almost everybody who has had a child -- that includes me -- knows how annoying it can be when they learn how to make "Why?" into a way to drive a parent crazy. You need to turn the TV off and go to bed.Why?Because it's late and you need to go to school tomorrow.Why do I need to go to school?So you can learn things.Why should I learn things? And so it goes, until the parent gets fed up and ends the discussion with "Because I said so! Go brush your teeth!" Andy Norman uses this sort of Why? reasoning…
6
Posted inBuddhism Free will Reality

“Moon” movie points to shocking non-supernatural realization

A year or so ago I watched "Moon" via Netflix. I guess at this point I need to enter an obligatory spoiler alert, in case anyone hasn't seen this 2009 movie and thinks they might want to see it without knowing a crucial plot element. This was an intriguing movie, though not super-entertaining. The acting was good, but not exceptional. What I distinctly remember was a shocking twist. There Sam Bell (played by Sam Rockwell) is, at a base on the moon where a mining operation is taking place. He's looking forward to returning home after a three-year solitary tour…
9
Posted inReality

Thoughts are not facts — great thing to keep in mind

Over on my other blog, HinesSight, yesterday I wrote "Covid reality: thoughts are not facts." It starts this way: Driving into Salem today, listening to a news channel on satellite radio, I heard a public health expert say something that made me grab a piece of paper and write it down as soon as I came to a stop: Thoughts are not facts.  She was referring to wearing masks in schools as they reopen after a summer break. Like when a student or parent says, "But I thought that wasn't going to be necessary since Covid cases were declining so…
13
Posted inPolitics Reality

Capitol police are speaking the truth right now

As I write this I'm listening to televised testimony of four police officers who are appearing at the first meeting of the Select Committee on the January 6 insurrection at the nation's capitol. Watch it, Church of the Churchless commenters who think truth is relative, that what experts and professionals say can't be trusted, that everyone is free to create their own reality, that this physical realm is an illusion, that objectivity isn't possible, and other blather spewed from your religious sensibilities. Watch it, because the truth is being spoken by four brave men who put their lives on the…
27
Posted inBooks Reality

Truth isn’t personal, but institutional

This morning I finished reading The Constitution of Knowledge, a book by Jonathan Rauch whose subtitle is "In Defense of Truth."  As noted in a previous blog post about this book, Rauch persuasively argues that truth isn't personal, but institutional. Or social, if you have a dislike of institutions and prefer another word. Here's a quote from the second to last page of the book that ends with a reflection of this point: "...and outsource reality to a global network of strangers." As I wrote in chapter 1, the Constitution of Knowledge is the most successful social design in human…
8
Posted inReality Science

Thanks to Appreciative Reader for defending the scientific worldview

There are three thousand word comments that deserve trashing. Then there are comments of the same length that deserve fervent applause from those of us who respect reality, truth, evidence, reason, and the scientific worldview. That's why I'm sharing another lengthy comment from "Appreciative Reader" below.  As you'll see if you read the following comment published on my Why neither unicorns nor God are to be believed in post, Appreciative Reader absolutely demolishes the religious perspective of another commenter, Spence Tepper. If this were a boxing fight, it'd be called after the second or third round because too much damage…
94
Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas Reality Religions

Why should anyone else believe what you believe?

Well, the responses I got to my previous post, "Objective reality is validated by the reality-based community," were underwhelming.  Not really surprising, since I said: The question I'd pose to those who hold a mystical, religious, or intuitive view of reality is this: what alternative to Rauch's approach below do you suggest for determining the nature of objective reality? Meaning, it is easy to criticize reason, rationality, facts, science, open discussion, criticism of propositions about reality, and such. But it is difficult, if not impossible, to come up with a better approach than the Constitution of Knowledge. Read what follows.…
11
Posted inBooks Reality

Objective reality is validated by the reality-based community

I figured that I needed to share another excerpt from Jonathan Rauch's book, "The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth," that comes just before the passages I included in a previous post about this intriguing book. Those Rules for Reality in the previous post have to be implemented by someone. That someone is the reality-based community. In another post I'll share what Rausch considers that community to be.  Basically its people who are willing to act in accord with the Constitution of Knowledge, in much the same way patriotic Americans are willing to abide by the United States Constitution. Of…
24
Posted inReality

Rules for Reality — which religious believers ignore

I'm a proud member of the reality-based community. This is a big reason why I no longer believe in God or supernatural phenomena.  It'd be nice if these things actually existed. But "nice" is irrelevant when it comes to learning the truth about reality. Reality is what it is, not what individuals want it to be. When I learned about Jonathan Rauch's book, "The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth," the title alone made me want to buy it. I've only read two of the eight chapters, but I skipped ahead and read the passages that I've shared below.…
63
Posted inReality Universe

Mystery of existence is a chill up the spine, not a concept

For many years I've gotten a thrill out of the mystery of existence.  This has nothing to do with what exists. It's all about the brute fact that something exists. Now, that something might well be infinite. For sure it's huge -- countless billions of light years huge. And it's old -- at least 13.8 billion years old and possibly infinitely old. All that is irrelevant when talking about the mystery of existence.  What blows my mind with marvelous regularity is the chill-up-the-spine realization that all this, no matter what it consists of -- is equally present at the tips…
19
Posted inComments Reality Spiritual practice/meditation

Is a mechanism required for realizing Oneness?

Below I've shared a lengthy comment from "Appreciative Reader" that deserved to be made into a blog post. Why? Because the comment is nicely thought out and well written. It addresses an interesting question: whether someone's experience of Oneness just happened, and can't be described in a step-by-step fashion, or whether a mechanism that leads to an experience like this can be communicated to others. I tend to agree with Appreciative Reader that in general, someone's spiritual realization is capable of being analyzed and critiqued to a significant degree. As I've noted before, dreams are highly personal and unlike everyday…
59
Posted inBooks Reality Science

Be born again through science

Frank Wilczek, winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2004, has written a compelling book about the universe: Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality. Here's a passage from his Afterword chapter that I like a lot. It is indeed strange that we make such a division between internal and external worlds, when in truth there is only one thing going on. The child of our introduction, now an adult, may come to understand the fundamental conclusions that science, following its radically conservative method, reaches about the physical world.  Then she is prepared to revisit the starting point of her adventure…
12
Posted inReality

Radical embrace of reality

I like the sound of it: radical embrace of reality.  I'm not entirely sure what those words mean to me. They just popped into my head recently, and I've given them a home in my cranium until they decide to pop out and head somewhere else. As long as this notion is rumbling around in my mind, I figure I might as well try to describe why I find it so appealing.  Reality is a close relative of truth. I admire both -- reality and truth. When I used to give talks to fellow devotees of the Eastern form of…
4