Posted inMystics Reality Religions

Religion and mysticism are mostly conceptual

Reality can't be captured in concepts. After all, it's extremely unlikely that the human brain has evolved to be able to completely capture the nature of the reality that fashioned both the human brain and everything else in existence. But this doesn't take away the utility of concepts for making sense of the world. "Tree" is a useful way of describing the general nature of vegetative entities that vary tremendously in size, appearance, and such, yet share common characteristics. However, trees are part of the natural world. They are obviously real.  Concepts that refer to entities which can't be observed…
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Posted inFundamentalism Religions

A quote that shows the arrogance of religious zealots

If there's one thing that religious zealots aren't, it's humble. Well, actually there's many other things that they aren't also. Like, in touch with reality; thoughtful; reasonable; open-minded; respectful of truth. But a lack of humility stood out in a quote I came across in an article in the February 27 issue of The New Yorker, Minister of Chaos: Itamar Ben-Gvir and the politics of reaction. It's about one of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu's cabinet members. Ben-Gvir is a right-wing extremist who was named the national security minister. The quote came from Dov Morell. Morell used to embrace the views…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas Religions

“Truth-Default Theory” helps explain why religions get away with falsehoods

Last Sunday a friend gave me his unread copy of Malcolm Gladwell's 2019 book, Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don't Know. I hadn't heard of the book before. It seems to be less well known than Gladwell's other books like Blink and The Tipping Point. I'm enjoying it after reading the first few chapters. This morning I read "The Queen of Cuba." A primary focus of the chapter is on how Ana Belen Montes, a Cuban expert at the Defense Intelligence Agency, got away with being a double agent for Cuba even though warning…
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Posted inIndia Religions

India’s 1947 partition shows destructiveness of religion

My previous blog post was about Indian Prime Minister Modi's involvement in the Gujarat massacre of 2002, where about 1,000 people (mostly Muslims, I assume) were killed by Hindu nationalists. But that death toll is nothing compared to what happened after the British partitioned India into a Muslim territory and non-Muslim territory in 1947.  I don't know a lot about the Indian Partition. However, I learned something about it in an article in the January 2 & 9 issue of The New Yorker. The magazine article is called "Blood Lines: Seventy-five years after Indian Partition, have we learned how to…
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Posted inFundamentalism Religions

Image of Muhammad causes uproar. I’m pleased to share it.

It's bizarre how fundamentalist Muslims get so upset over images of their Prophet Muhammad, whether these be paintings or cartoons. Just another example of the utter irrationality of religious believers. Today the New York Times had a story, "A Lecturer Showed a Painting of the Prophet Muhammad. She Lost Her Job." This happened even after the instructor told her students in advance what she was going to do and on the day of the showing gave the students another chance to say if they had a problem with this. Erika López Prater, an adjunct professor at Hamline University, said she…
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Posted inReligions

Worst thing about religions is unreasonable expectations

Since today is Christmas, supposedly the day Christ was born of a virgin (a crazy idea explored here), I feel like I should write about why I've come to dislike religions so much, whether of an Eastern or Western variety. That's a difficult question to answer, because there's so much to criticize about these belief systems founded on supernatural premises that basically have zero grounding in any sort of evidence-based reality. Here's an attempt that discusses something I haven't emphasized much in previous blog posts, at least not explicitly:  One of the worst things about religions is how they encourage…
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Posted inHumor Religions

Scientology gets much-deserved ridicule in South Park episode

There's so much competition for The World's Craziest Religion, it's impossible to pick a clear winner. But Scientology has to be somewhere near the top of Mt. Crazy. I say this even though I don't know very much about Scientology. Well, until today. For after watching a South Park episode that was on one of the televisions in the aerobics room of my athletic club where I exercised this afternoon, I feel like I do know a lot about Scientology. You can too, if you watch the 22-minute episode. Wikipedia has a summary of the plot of "Trapped in the…
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Posted inBooks Buddhism Religions

A philosopher’s take on fate, Buddhism, religions

Before the book I've been writing about recently -- Kieran Setiya's Life is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way -- is put away on a bookshelf where I'll have trouble finding it (my books aren't organized very well), I wanted to share some final observations from Setiya that I found interesting. No such thing as fate. I agree with Setiya that fate doesn't exist, at least not in the sense of events in our life being preordained. I'd say, though, that they're ordained, in that chains of causes and effects control everything in the cosmos outside of…
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Posted inPolitics Religions

Putin is an autocrat. So are many religious leaders.

Today Vladimir Putin, the autocrat who controls Russia with extremely little opposition or checks and balances, did what authoritarians like him do. Act horribly. In Putin's twisted psyche, he has the right to unilaterally declare that four regions of eastern Ukraine now are part of Russia, following sham referendums in those regions where soldiers knocked on doors and demanded that people vote yes or no on joining Russia. Not surprisingly, the fake voting produced strong majorities in favor of becoming part of Russia. Now Putin can claim that if Ukraine attacks those regions, as it certainly will keep on doing,…
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Posted inReligions Science

Here’s what makes something scientific or ascientific

Recently I was talking with someone about Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), the India-based religious group centered on a guru that I was a member of for 35 years.  I mentioned to this person that I'd always loved science, so one thing that attracted me to RSSB way back in 1970 was that it sometimes used Science of the Soul to describe itself.  I liked the idea of a spiritual science. But back then I hadn't given a lot of thought to what makes something a science. There's lots of different definitions. In her book, "Existential Physics," here's how Sabine…
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Posted inBooks Radha Soami Satsang Beas Religions

How minds change. It isn’t by brute force.

Since I started this blog in 2004, I've been trying to change the minds of religious believers in the direction of being less dogmatic, judgmental, and rigid. In this endeavor I've been guided mostly by my own experience and intuition. So when I saw a book review in the July 2 issue of New Scientist about "How Minds Change: The new science of belief, opinion, and persuasion" by David McRaney, I was interested to see what the book is all about. After all, how many of us have changed our mind about something after someone started screaming in our face…
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Posted inReligions Science

What grounds religion and mysticism in reality? Nothing

During the 35 years I was a believer in an Eastern religion -- Sant Mat, of the Radha Soami Satsang Beas variety -- I spent a lot of time pondering how it was possible to know whether a description of God, spirit, soul, heaven, or something else supernatural really was true. Meaning, that the description wasn't just a bunch of words strung together in a fashion meant to be convincing, but actually reflected the nature of an aspect of reality that transcended this physical universe. My first book, "God's Whisper, Creation's Thunder," was an examination of how the new physics…
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Posted inReligions Science

Science has a radical distrust of certainty. Me too.

If you're absolutely certain that you know what is true, this is a very good sign that you're wrong. Also, that you are religious rather than scientific. This is one of the compelling insights theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli talks about in the concluding chapter of his book, "Reality is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity." In another post I'll describe why Rovelli views the as-yet-unproven theory of quantum gravity as the best approach to resolving the divide between relativity theory and quantum mechanics. For now, I liked what Rovelli had to say about the approach of science…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas Religions

“Under the Banner of Heaven” a compelling story of religion gone bad

Having just written the title of this of this blog post, the question that comes to mind is whether there's ever a compelling story of religion gone good.  In my current atheist frame of mind, the answer is no. But during the 35 years I was a believer, Eastern religion variety, I would have said, "Of course there is, my chosen faith." Problem is, everyone who buys into a religion thinks the same way. Their faith is absolutely great, almost faultless. It's those other faiths who give religions a bad name. My wife and I have started watching Under the…
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Posted inGod Religions

Will Smith thinks God called on him to slap Chris Rock

In case you're one of the few people in the world who isn't aware of what happened at the 2022 Oscars show last night, here's a recap in a New York Times story.  Will Smith apologized to the comedian Chris Rock on Monday evening for slapping him during Sunday night’s Oscars telecast after the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which administers the awards, denounced his actions and opened an inquiry into the incident. ...The incident unfolded Sunday night after Mr. Rock made a joke about the buzzed hair of Mr. Smith’s wife, Jada Pinkett Smith, who has alopecia,…
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Posted inReality Religions

Enjoying religious stories is fine. Just realize they’re fiction.

As I've noted before on this blog, I'm a big believer in good stories. I enjoy reading fiction. I enjoy watching fiction.  It never fails to amaze me that I can be sitting in our bathtub every evening, nestled in hot water with a vaporizer full of quality Oregon marijuana, holding an escapist thriller book (I love Vince Flynn's Mitch Rapp novels; he's a CIA operative), getting excited about whether Rapp is going to succeed in his latest exploit -- while I know full well that Mitch Rapp is a creation of Flynn's imagination, or in the case of the…
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Posted inAtheism God Religions

Fear of God’s wrath is a lousy reason to be religious

Life is difficult. This is something almost everyone can agree on, believers and atheists alike. But only religious people add to life's difficulties by imagining God inflicts pain and suffering on those who don't comply with whatever commandments their religion believes in. I was a Catholic briefly as a child. I readily admit that I've never learned why confession is, or at least was, a big part of being a Catholic. I simply remember that as part of my first communion, I had to confess my sins to a priest. Being so young, I wasn't much of a sinner. So…
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Posted inPolitics Religions

Putin is an authoritarian. So are most religious leaders.

There are lots of reasons to support Ukraine after it was invaded by Russia. One key reason is this: it wasn't Russia that invaded Ukraine. It was Vladimir Putin, the authoritarian ruler of Russia. Now, defenders of what Russia did might say that in the United States, the president is the commander-in-chief of the military. So a decision to go to war rests with the president.  Actually, that isn't true. Our Constitution gives Congress the right to declare war. Recently American presidents have usurped that power in various ways, but the Constitution hasn't changed.  But in Russia, Putin is completely…
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Posted inHumor Religions

Wacky religious news: Islamic sex cult and baptism gone wrong

My wife, Laurel, a proud atheist, enjoys finding stories about the bizarre side of religions (assuming there is anything other than bizarre in religiosity). Recently she came across the tale of Adnan Oktar, a Turkish sex cult leader.  In the end, it was not the British deep state, Darwinists, Jews, Freemasons or any of the sinister cabals that Adnan Oktar long railed against that defeated him. It was the Turkish judiciary. On Monday, the notorious 64-year-old preacher, often referred to in salacious headlines as a "sex cult leader," was sentenced to 1,075 years in jail for crimes including sexual assault, sexual…
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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…
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