Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas Religions

Sam Harris on dangers of religious ecstasy

Reading "Islam and the Misuses of Ecstasy" by Sam Harris brought back some memories. I wouldn't call them exactly religiously ecstatic, but they were damn close. The first time I went to India, for two weeks in 1977, I was able to experience one of the large "bhandaras" held at the headquarters of Radha Soami Satsang Beas in the Punjab. This is a photo I took, showing just a portion of the gigantic crowd that had come to hear and see the RSSB guru. (I wrote in "God's here, but I've got to go" about the decidedly non-ecstatic experience of…
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Posted inReligions Science

We will bury you!

Here's another churchless guest post from regular commenter "cc." I titled this post as he named his short essay. Hope he's right... that science and evidence-based rationality will supplant religiosity. It's a slow process, though. The United States is highly developed in many regards. But we have a seemingly never-ending supply of religious nutheads. Under certain conditions, science undermines religion and eventually supplants it. This is demonstrated in the developed world  where the scientific method is held in higher esteem than religious faith. In the most highly developed countries, only a minority of knuckleheads revere and refer to holy scriptures,…
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Posted inReligions Science

Separating numinous from supernatural

Occasionally "cc," a regular commenter on this blog, sends me email messages. They're as cogent, interesting, and well-written as his comments.  Below is a recently-received message that deserves sharing. One of the things I like most about cc's style is the open-endedness of his thoughts. Usually what he says leaves me with more questions, rather than answers. Or questions about answers. Reading the following message, I was struck by the words numinous and numinosity. "Numinous" usually is considered to belong in the realm of religion, referring to some sort of divine experience.  But the Wikipedia article notes that numinous can…
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Posted inReligions

Fireplaces are bad for you. Also, pleasant. Like religion.

Here's a thought-provoking You Tube video: someone reading aloud Sam Harris' essay "The Fireplace Delusion."  It's about how we can emotionally and intuitively enjoy something, while understanding reasonably and factually that this thing isn't good for us. We have a wood stove in our house, but we don't use it very much -- for reasons described in the video. Plus, my wife has allergies. However, I enjoy burning wood outside.  I'm not sure how well this fireplace: religion metaphor works. Yet like almost everything Sam Harris writes, it makes you think.   
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Posted inReligions

Religions make a Big Problem out of life’s little problems

We've all got problems. Some days it seems like life is nothing but one problem popping up after another. Car won't start. Forgot to pay credit card bill. Child came home with bad report card. Faucet has started leaking. Knee is hurting for some reason. Of course, much of life is problem-free. Or seemingly so. Even when things are going well, usually there's some nagging glitch that keeps an enjoyable experience from being perfectly so. I'm enjoying the movie, but, geez, why does that guy behind me have to eat his popcorn so noisily? There's no problem in getting help…
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Posted inReligions Spiritual practice/meditation

God talks to lots of people… the mind talking to itself

Has God ever talked to you? Have you ever heard divine sounds, or seen divine visions? If so, you've got lots of company according to "Is That God Talking?" by T.M. Luhrmann, a professor of anthropology at Stanford. A questionnaire posed to 375 college students found that 71 percent reported vocal hallucinations of some kind, according to a study published in 1984 (a finding consistent with my own research). A 2000 study found that 38.7 percent of the population reported visual, auditory or other hallucinations, including out-of-body experiences. Interesting.  Fairly frequently people post comments on this blog or send me emails about…
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Posted inReality Religions

Hume ridicules religious imagination

David Hume, the 18th century Scottish philosopher (1711-1776), is a favorite of modern day scientists and scientifically-minded philosophers. Somehow I'd reached the age of 64 without reading all of his "Concerning Human Understanding," even though my mother bought the Great Books of the Western World series when I was about nine -- and I inherited the collection when she died. I'm getting to know Hume now. And am liking him a lot. Sure, he writes in a style that seems stilted. But his ideas about experience, cause and effect, religious belief, and such are wonderfully up to date. I'm most…
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Posted inFundamentalism Religions

Criticizing Islam isn’t racist

I enjoy getting comments on my blog posts. Many add informative extras to what I was writing about. But sometimes I read a comment that makes so little sense, my only reaction is a bewildered "huh?" Such as this one, submitted in response to "Of all the crazy religions, is Islam the most dangerous?" I was a big fan, but now you lost me. Now you just seem racist to me. Sorry. I'm no fan of religions, any of them, but it's fundamentalists that are the problem. I don't like it when people target any particular group. The Muslims I…
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Posted inReligions

Of all the crazy religions, is Islam the most dangerous?

Reportedly one of the Boston Marathon bombers, Tamerlan, the older brother, became much more fundamentalist in his Islamic beliefs before he and his younger brother killed and injured so many people. [Note: what follows is a great argument for encouraging young men to embrace marijuana, girls, and alcohol rather than strict religiosity.] Once known as a quiet teenager who aspired to be a boxer, Tamerlan Tsarnaev delved deeply into religion in recent years at the urging of his mother, who feared he was slipping into a life of marijuana, girls and alcohol. Tamerlan quit drinking and smoking, gave up boxing…
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Posted inMystics Religions

Kumare: truthful movie about a fake guru

"How do you know I'm not a fake? Maybe I just have the gift of gab." There's a guru in India whom I'm familiar with, Gurinder Singh, who used to frequently say this. Maybe he still does. At the time I was associated with the organization Gurinder Singh leads, his disciples would look upon those statements as a sign of some sort of humility/ Zen'ish koan/ anti-mystical mystic utterance. Which, interestingly, is almost exactly what students who flocked to a genuinely fake guru, Kumare, a.k.a. New Jersey-born Vikram Ghandi, felt when at every yoga class he taught he told them…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories Religions

Wow. I’m (finally) polite to some Jehovah’s Witnesses.

My Buddha-nature must be coming along nicely. This morning I was the most courteous I've ever been to the Jehovah's Witnesses who periodically ring our rural doorbell. And I had some reasons to be my usual blunt, ascerbic self. The blueberry-filled whole wheat pancake I usually have for Sunday breakfast had just been put on a plate, butter and syrup applied. I was hungry. Hearing the doorbell ring, my wife said "Who could that be at this time?" It took me about two seconds to make what turned out to be a highly accurate guess.  I opened the front door…
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Posted inReligions Spiritual practice/meditation

Spirituality is liberal, religiosity is conservative

Thanks to Steve for letting me know about a study that confirms what seems intuitively obvious.  People become more politically liberal immediately after practising a spiritual exercise such as meditation, researchers at the University of Toronto have found. "There's great overlap between religious beliefs and political orientations," says one of the study authors, Jordan Peterson of U of T's Department of Psychology. "We found that religious individuals tend to be more conservative and spiritual people tend to be more liberal. "Inducing a spiritual experience through a guided meditation exercise led both liberals and conservatives to endorse more liberal political attitudes." Here's a…
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Posted inReality Religions Science

Beyond humanism and absolutism… mystery

What is real? Great question. Just the sort of question to tackle in a blog post. Such is the hubris of bloggers.  Hubris is a word that's used a lot in David E. Cooper's "The Measure of Things: Humanism, Humility, and Mystery." Wikipedia clues us in to the meaning of hubris. Not a good quality to have if you seek to know the nature of reality. Hubris (pron.: /ˈhjuːbrɪs/), also hybris, from ancient Greek ὕβρις, means extreme pride or arrogance. Hubris often indicates a loss of contact with reality and an overestimation of one's own competence or capabilities, especially when the person exhibiting it is in a position of…
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Posted inReligions

Believers in God, others believe like you do. Just not in God.

Everybody has that wonderful feeling of "I'm certain this is true." Everybody. I blogged about this neuroscientific fact in I know I'm right about uncertainty. I included an Amazon summary of "On Being Certain: Believing You are Right Even When You're Not." You recognize when you know something for certain, right? You "know" the sky is blue, or that the traffic light had turned green, or where you were on the morning of September 11, 2001--you know these things, well, because you just do. In On Being Certain, neurologist Robert Burton challenges the notions of how we think about what we…
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Posted inReligions Science

Science progresses. Religion doesn’t.

Science knows a lot about reality. Even more impressive, science steadily knows more and more about reality. I subscribe to several science magazines, New Scientist and Scientific American. In every issue I learn about advances in the scientific understanding of the cosmos. But when was the last time religions told us something factually new about how the world works? In fact, so far as I know there hasn't been a first time. Or an anytime. Meaning, even though prophets, mystics, sages, gurus, enlightened masters, and such supposedly have had access to beyond-normal ways of knowing, none of them ever have…
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Posted inReligions

Atheism: natural, moral, open-minded

I suppose I'm an atheist. After all, I don't believe in God. There's no demonstrable evidence of God. I want to spend what likely is my one and only life as close to reality as possible. Imagination is fine and fun, but it should be a supplement to living, not the main course. I used to shy away from the term, "atheist." It's got a negative vibe in the United States' highly religious culture. Reading Julian Baggini's wonderful little book, Atheism: A Very Short Introduction, has made me more comfortable with saying, yeah, I'm an atheist.  Here's some reasons I've…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories Radha Soami Satsang Beas Religions

Weird religious stuff I’ve believed or done

A couple of weeks into the New Year, I still haven't completely broken a half-hearted resolution: be more understanding and less in-your-face toward people I disagree with.  Such as on matters of religion or politics. Which are the main areas in life where I can get frothy at the mouth with indignation at how incredibly stupid some people can be who aren't like wise me. I've been trying to remember that over my 64 years of living, my own religious and political views have changed a lot. I've believed and done things in the past that my present self would…
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Posted inBooks Religions

Give up religious certainty. Embrace antifragile chaos.

Antifragile. It's my new favorite word. It's the title of Nassim Nicholas Taleb's latest book. I'm only a few chapters into it, but already love the notion that what sustains nature, life, economies, just about everything, isn't rigid robustness. Stresses that leave us the same aren't growthful. What we want is to be able to thrive on unpredictability, not-knowing, random stresses. Wind extinguishes a candle and energizes fire. Likewise with randomness, uncertainty, chaos: you want to use them, not hide from them. You want to be the fire and wish for the wind... The mission is how to domesticate, even dominate,…
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Posted inReality Religions

How atheists comfort children about death

Interesting story in the Washington Post: "Atheist parents comfort children about death without talk of God or heaven." As so many millions of Americans turn to clergy and prayers to help their children sort out the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, parents like Drizin do not. They don’t agonize over interpreting God’s will or message in the event. They don’t seek to explain what kind of God allows suffering, and they don’t fudge it when children ask what happens to people who die, be they Grandma or the young victims of Newtown. It's kind of weird, of course, that non-religious…
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Posted inReligions

Religious arguments I respect, and those I don’t

Having served as the un-pastor of this here Church of the Churchless for over eight years, I've heard just about every argument for the existence of God, soul, spirit, heaven, miracles, life after death, and other supernatural stuff. Naturally -- given my current skeptical, scientific nature -- I don't resonate much with religiosity. Been there, done that. But I can understand why other people do embrace religion. And I respect their viewpoints when they're presented in a reasonable, open-minded fashion. TypePad, my blog service, tells me that there have been 24,143 comments on the 1,637 posts I've written. Like I…
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