Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas Reality

Religious believers ignore reality, while making up fantasies

After fourteen years of blogging here on the Church of the Churchless, I'm not surprised anymore by this evident fact about most religious believers: They make two mistakes. They ignore aspects of this evident physical reality that conflict with their chosen religious dogma. And they embrace fantasies about supernatural realms that almost certainly don't exist.  Thus religious believers close their eyes to what can actually be known, while making up stories about what is unknown -- such as what, if anything, lies outside the bounds of our universe. Here's some examples of what I'm talking about.  I've written several posts…
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Posted inMystics Reality

Why I don’t believe in anyone’s supposed supernatural experience

Today I got an email from someone who said: Well, here in your blog itself, you have all of these people sharing their experiences.  Huge voluminous paragraphs detailing all kinds of dramatic experiences, with stars and moons and spatial flight and GIHFs [God In Human Form] popping up with personal guidance and what-have-you.  My question is : Why do you ignore them now, now that you do see these experiences spoken of, quite plainly? This was my response.----------------------------As you might expect, I consider that people who say they’ve had experiences of a supernatural reality are either deluding themselves, or other…
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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 inReality Religions Science

A test that science passes and religion fails: reality “kicks back”

How do we know what is real? This is a question that has occupied philosophers and scientists for as long as we humans have been pondering the nature of reality. I don't pretend to know the answer, but I resonate with physicist David Deutsch's approach to the question. In his book, "The Fabric of Reality," Deutsch views explanations as being key to understanding what is real. He writes: Explanations are not justified by the means by which they were derived; they are justified by their superior ability, relative to rival explanations, to solve the problems they address. That is why…
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Posted inReality

All problems and solutions are within the mind, not the world

One reason I love to read is that a few sentences in a book can make me go Wow! or Whoa! to such an extent, I feel like it is worth reading hundreds of pages to be exposed to a single fresh thought. That happened to me this morning as I was reading the "Criteria for Reality" chapter in physicist David Deutsch's book, The Fabric of Reality. Here's what grabbed my attention: Galileo may have seen the world as a book in which the laws of nature are written in mathematical symbols. But that is strictly a metaphor; there are…
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Posted inReality Religions

Religion is a warm bath. Atheism is a cold shower.

I love not only warm baths, but hot ones. It feels good to be immersed in water close to my body temperature. It relaxes me, makes me feel comfortable, sometimes puts me to sleep. When I want to wake up, though, a cold shower is much better. Now, I don't actually take cold showers unless our water heater is broken and I'm desperate to get clean. However, I have taken a cold shower of truth, which is why I chose atheism over religion after some 35 years of being an ardent believer in God, soul, spirit, and heaven. (Eastern religion…
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Posted inFree will Reality Science

Free will and religion are both comforting fantasies

I've just about finished re-reading a great book by a British attorney, Richard Oerton, who has spent half a century pondering the nature, or rather lack thereof, of free will.  Previously I've written about "The Nonsense of Free Will: Facing Up to a False Belief" in these posts: Free will is a wonderful thing to loseSitting in the jury box, I deny free willBelief in free will linked to desire to punish Oerton makes some highly persuasive arguments against free will, building his case with a mixture of logic and facts. I'm enjoying his book even more the second time…
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Posted inReality Religions

How deluded are you? (If you’re religious, you’ll score higher.)

The most recent issue of New Scientist has a story called "Delusional You." The online version is differently titled: Grand delusions: Why we all believe the weirdest things. Now, most of us consider that it is other people who are deluded, and that we're an exception, being nicely connected to reality. Which, I suppose, is another delusion. Here's an excerpt from the story. That we are all prone to delusions may not be so surprising. A range of cognitive biases makes the human mind fertile soil for growing all kinds of irrational beliefs. Confirmation bias, for example, means we ignore inconvenient…
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Posted inReality Spiritual practice/meditation

How an atheist can find “spiritual” inspiration

A few days ago I was talking with somebody about finding "spiritual" uplift without believing in God or any other supernatural entity. I put that word, spiritual, in quotation marks because I no longer consider that there's some sort of other-worldly spirit or soul. Not in me. Not in anybody else. Not in the cosmos. Yet I'm still attracted to the notion of spirituality. In a thoroughly secular sense. Meaning, well... it's all about meaning. Whatever inspires us to carry on through tough times; whatever propels us forward on our life journey when we're not sure if we can take…
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Posted inReality Religions

Tempting as it is to pray, health problems should be managed without God

I've got some semi-serious health problems. Meaning, they aren't fatal or debilitating. But they're damn annoying. The details aren't necessary to know for the purposes of this post, though I've blogged about what I'm going through here.  It's been interesting to see how my atheist mind has been dealing with the stress I've been feeling. Back in 2006 I wrote a couple of posts on the subject of turning to God during difficult times. The first was "Atheists in foxholes do exist." It concluded with: Religious belief or faith is almost always individualistic. That’s a paradox, considering that humility and loss…
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Posted inReality

When should a subjective spiritual experience be trusted as reflecting objective reality?

I love the title of this blog post, because it is such a damn fine question. During the thirteen years this Church of the Churchless blog has existed, I'd say that this question has been at the root of more posts and comments than any other existential issue. After all, consider how relatively easy it is to assess the validity of (1) objective experiences of physical reality, and (2) subjective experiences of physical reality.  As an example of (1), if someone claims that they saw a giraffe in their back yard, we've got to consider the circumstances. Perhaps they live…
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Posted inBooks Plotinus Reality

“The Realm of the Wise” is a book I both agree and disagree with

A while back I got an email from Marc Deprey, who shares my interest in Greek philosophy -- notably Plotinus' conception of the One as being both the fountainhead and essence of existence.  Deprey said that he'd written a book, "The Realm of the Wise," that has quite a bit in common with my book about Plotinus' teachings, "Return to the One."  Bookaholic that I am, I couldn't resist ordering a copy from Amazon. The Realm of the Wise is appealingly short -- just 134 pages.  There is very little, if any, overt religiosity in Deprey's book, another plus. He…
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Posted inReality Science

My atheist sources of awe: existence, evolution, consciousnessI

In my previous Church of the Churchless post I talked about how much I liked "The Way of Wonder" by Jack Haas. Wonder, awe, even reverence -- these aren't feelings that only religious believers have.  Hey, us atheists are equally wonder-filled, awestruck, reverent before something much greater than us. We just are in awe of what really exists, not what is imagined to exist.  (Like God, heaven, soul, spirit.) On a dog walk this afternoon I got to thinking about what I find most atheistically awesome about reality. Here's my top three, in order of awesomeness.  Naturally I've included links…
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Posted inReality Science

It isn’t all about us. Humans aren’t special.

We have no option but to use our human ways of knowing to understand the universe. However, this doesn't mean that us Homo sapiens possess the capability of accurately answering all the questions about the cosmos that come to mind.  Or even being sure that we're able to ask the proper questions.  More and more, I'm embracing the conclusion that human consciousness likely isn't capable of grasping the Great Big Questions (notably including why the universe exists at all), much less the answers to them. Here's a letter from the June 2017 issue of Scientific American on this subject. I've…
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Posted inGod Reality

Believers, be clear about what sort of belief you want others to accept

Someone recently emailed me, asking if I read the many comments (223, currently) on a recent Church of the Churchless post. Here's part of my reply. I admit that I haven’t read the many comments on this post in much detail. In my current irreligious frame of mind it just strikes me as mostly meaningless to discuss/argue about subjective experiences as if they reflect some objective reality. There’s no way to tell whether someone’s supposed “mystical” experience is anything other than a projection of their own mind absent some sort of convincing demonstrable evidence.   Logical or reasonable arguments can…
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Posted inReality

Perhaps “why?” is a word without meaning

Like young children, we adults also love to ask Why?  It just seems so natural to want to understand why our car won't start, why our spouse is angry with us, why we've got a stomach ache.  I'm not denying the usefulness of why, of seeking causes, of fathoming the source from which a certain aspect of reality has sprung.  However, more and more, I'm beginning to sense that the question which we take for granted -- why? -- may lack meaning beyond the minds of us humans.  Of course, this could be said of anything. Even when it comes…
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Posted inReality Science

Have faith that reality is better than any belief

One of my first Church of the Churchless posts, "Just have faith," was written in November 2004. It's still one of my favorites. Re-reading it today, I was pleased that I still agree with just about everything in it.  The reason: even though thirteen years ago I was more open to the hypothesis of God and life after death than I am now, the method of open-minded scientific faith that should be used to investigate all sorts of hypotheses -- both worldly and spiritual -- rings as true to me today as it did back then.  My personal research into…
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Posted inReality Science

Reality is a terrible thing to waste — yet religions and politicians do

What is real? This is one of the most important questions. I've grappled with it for my entire adult life.  The basic problem I or anyone else faces in answering that question is that we humans are subjective beings who exist in an objective world.  So subjectivity and objectivity are intermingled in everything we do, which includes grappling with the nature of reality. Wisdom, in my admittedly subjective opinion, largely lies in recognizing the difference between "I believe," "I feel," and similar I-based views, and "It is true that..." The latter sort of statement refers to an intersubjective reality, which…
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Posted inBooks Reality Science

“The Simplest Case Scenario” is a must-read for philosophical science-lovers

Scientific. Philosophical. Well-written. Creative. Mind-expanding.  "The Simplest Case Scenario" by Karl Coryat pushed all of my book-loving buttons.  It's subtitle points to why I liked it so much: How the universe may be very different from what we think it is. I've believed this for my entire adult life. But for most of that time I thought that the Secret of the Cosmos could only be revealed through mysticism, meditation, philosophical contemplation, enlightenment, psychedelics.  At the same time, I've always adored science. I've read countless (almost) books about quantum mechanics, cosmology, neuroscience, cutting edge physics, systems theory, evolution, and such.…
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Posted inPolitics Reality

Viewing life as a Plinko board: probabilistic, chaotic, uncertain

It's easy to see what happens in life. It's much more difficult to comprehend why something happens. For example, we know that Donald Trump has been elected president of the United States. But why this occurred -- beyond the obvious "Trump got more electoral votes than Hillary Clinton" -- is a question that can't be definitively answered. This doesn't stop people from theorizing, though.  At one extreme, a religious believer might say It was God's will. Or phrased more generally, This was fated to be. At another extreme, a nihilistically-minded person could opine, Shit just happens; end of story. A book…
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