Posted inReligions Science

Faith is pretending to know things you don’t know

To most people, faith is a positive quality. Perhaps it is, if "faith" is construed as "hope" or "positive thinking." As in, I have faith that I'll be able to make it to the top of this mountain.  You don't know if you'll be able to reach the summit, but you hope that you will. Nothing wrong with this. Somewhat similarly, faith can be viewed in probabilistic terms. I have faith that my laptop will start up when I raise the lid in the morning, because so far it has every time I've done this. But in his book, "A…
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Posted inReligions

Is God a substitute for the social safety net?

It sure seems like people turn more toward God when they face tough times. If life doesn't give us what we need, the anticipation of better things to come in an afterlife offers hope that eternity in heaven will be much more pleasant than the time we spend on Earth. Thus an interesting letter in New Scientist hypothesizes that as near-universal health insurance through Obamacare/Affordable Care Act becomes more and more of a reality, religiosity in the United States will decline. We can only hope. From Rev Dr Derek SuchardIn his review of Ara Norenzayan's Big Gods: How religion transformed cooperation…
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Posted inReligions Spiritual practice/meditation

Imagine how you felt when you still believed

Almost everybody has believed in imaginary things.  God. Angels. Bigfoot. Flying saucers. Soul. That the barista at the coffee shop is really attracted to you when he/she smiles while handing over your drink. The list is endless. Because it feels good to believe in things that we want to be real, but almost certainly aren't.  How do we tell the difference between reality and illusion, fact and belief, actuality and hope? By using an everyday form of the scientific method: predict what would happen if your belief really is true. If that prediction comes to pass, or if the experiment…
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Posted inReligions

Religion Cheat Sheet — see what faith you believe in

When I got an email from someone representing Christian Universities Online who shared a link to their "Religion Cheat Sheet," I deleted the message after a quick lookover. But the next day this person said she was checking to see how I liked the infographic. If I did, was I going to pass it along to my blog readers? Well, Hailey, actually I do like the Religion Cheat Sheet. It's a clever and seemingly pretty darn accurate flow chart of what religion you end up with, given your answers to a few questions.  Give it a look-see below, or via…
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Posted inReligions

Don’t experience life through your phone. Or religion.

I admit it. I look at my iPhone frequently. It's a good friend. Keeps me in touch with what's going on. Does what I want it to most of the time. Allows me to communicate with people I care about. But I saw some of myself in a viral video, "I Forgot my Phone." Shows what occurs when life is lived through the screen of a smart phone: a direct connection with what is happening right in front of us becomes diluted through a technological filter. Question is: how different is this from living life through the screen of religious…
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Posted inReligions Spiritual practice/meditation

Become your own weird religion of one

I'm churchless. I don't belong to any organized religion. But actually I'm still religious. In a marvelously disorganized sense.  Meaning, I believe in a religion of one -- my own. It's all about me, myself, and I. There are no other members of my religion than moi.  And I seek no other members. In fact, it would be impossible for anyone else than me to believe in my religion, because not even I do.  Likely you're confused about what I just said. Join the club. I am also. Believe me, I find it difficult to believe that I believe what…
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Posted inReligions

Preachiness on my churchless blog is irritating

I'm pretty patient with people who want to leave religious'y comments on this blog. But eventually my patience wears thin.  I don't mind a few "I love [insert name of divine being] so much!" kinds of comments. Hey, I've been there and done that -- wanted to share my religious zeal with the world.  Eventually, though, the situation becomes akin to an alcoholic coming to a 12-step group where the members are dedicated to weaning themselves from a dependency on excessive drinking. And supporting each other in finding non-alcoholic ways of living life. The first question is: why is an…
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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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