Posted inBooks Politics Religions

What the Woke Racism book says about religion

Yesterday I wrote a post for my HinesSight blog, "Woke Racism" is a great book. The subtitle of the book is "How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America." John McWhorter, the author, is an atheist. So when he calls woke racism a religion, that's intended as a negative judgement.  In his chapter, The New Religion, McWhorter describes the ways what he calls The Elect (meaning, those who embrace woke racism) act in a religious fashion.  Here's some excerpts from that chapter. With the rise of Third Wave Antiracism we are witnessing the birth of a new religion, just as…
10
Posted inReligions Science

Supernatural beliefs lack both causes and mechanisms

When I press on certain keys on my MacBook Pro keyboard, magic happens! Which you can see. Because I can touch type, words form on my laptop's screen. After I publish this post, the words appear on my Church of the Churchless blog. Of course, all this isn't really magic. There's a chain of causes that leads to the words appearing in a blog post. Underlying those causes are hidden mechanisms -- software, hardware, internet functions, and such -- that most of us don't understand very well. But what we're certain of is the overall way someone typing out thoughts…
8
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 inAtheism God Religions

What if God hates religions?

I'm an atheist who likes to imagine how God thinks. What allows me to do this is the same reason anyone is able to make a claim about God. Since there's no convincing evidence that God exists, every person has an equal opportunity to imagine what this non-existent entity is like -- in much the same way that anyone can come up with a fictional story about characters they conjure up in their mind. So I enjoy visualizing how irritated God is at religious people. God is fine with people who use drugs, drink too much, watch porn all the…
13
Posted inReligions Science

Science is repeatable. Religions aren’t.

There are lots of reasons to choose science over religion. Chief among them, of course, is that science comes up with solid knowledge about reality, while religion doesn't.  But I find science's repeatability to be an especially appealing feature of science.  Meaning, if somehow all scientific knowledge were to disappear from the face of the Earth, while leaving humanity intact, there's little or no doubt that this knowledge eventually would be rediscovered.  In other words, science is repeatable. It's methods aren't dependent on one-of-a-kind happenstance, like Einstein being born at a particular time and place with certain aptitudes.  If Einstein…
17
Posted inBooks Religions

How religions disable our reasoning practices

Here's a marvelous excerpt from Andy Norman's book, "Mental Immunity: Infectious Ideas, Mind-Parasites, and the Search for a Better Way to Think."  I read it this morning and realized it's a terrific way to explain what's wrong with the irrationality of religion. Norman imagines that someone wants to figure out how to best undermine human reasoning that enables us to distinguish truth from falsehoods, what's real from what's illusory.  As you'll read below, what results is... (no big surprise) religion.  Imagine yourself part of a team charged with stress-testing civilization's all-important reasoning practices. The team has an initial meeting, and the…
110
Posted inBooks Religions

Religious beliefs can be false, yet useful

My wife turned me on to Andy Norman's book, "Mental Immunity: Infectious Ideas, Mind-Parasites, and the Search for a Better Way to Think." She's listening to it via the audiobook. I'm reading the print edition. The Covid pandemic has taught us all a lot about immunity against viruses. Vaccines help us fight off a Covid infection by strengthening our defenses against the viral invader. Likewise, Norman argues, minds are prone to being infected by bad ideas.  Unfortunately, there is no way to get a shot that wards off bad ideas. Instead, his book describes ways we can protect our mind…
26
Posted inPolitics Religions

Excessive wokeness is akin to extreme religiosity

Yesterday I wrote a post on my Salem Political Snark blog, "I get cited by Salem's Woke Police." Here I'll explore the connection between wokeness and religiosity. Since many people who visit this blog don't live in the United States, woke is a word that means "alert to racial or social discrimination and injustice." That sounds like a good thing, which usually it is. But as the saying goes, you can have too much of a good thing. About three weeks ago I helped start a new Facebook group here in Salem, Oregon. The instigator was a young woman who…
17
Posted inReligions

Islamic Shariah law to be enforced by Taliban

The Taliban say they're going to rule Afghanistan under Shariah law, which is based on Islamic tradition and authority, such as the Koran.  This doesn't bode well for Afghan women.  So I'm curious. Many commenters on this blog are religious. They believe in God. They accept the authority of religious leaders. The Taliban are religious. They believe in God. They accept the authority of religious leaders. Explain then, religious commenters, why you likely reject the Taliban's religious beliefs, while you consider your own to be so worthy.  The Taliban think they are acting in accord with the will of God.…
24
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 inRadha Soami Satsang Beas Reality Religions

You have options. In religions. In everything else.

I'm continuing to enjoy my reading of Julia Galef's The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don't, the subject of my previous post.  Her core idea is that motivated reasoning, where we ignore what's true because our motivation is to preserve our current belief structure, leads to a soldier mindset aimed at defending our beliefs from that unwelcome intruder, reality.  By contrast, a scout mindset values truth-seeking through accuracy motivated reasoning. Our goal is know what is really there, not what we hope is there, what we'd like to be there, or what others want us…
44
Posted inPolitics Religions

QAnon, like religion, doesn’t care about truth

Last night my wife and I finished watching the sixth and last episode of HBO's "QAnon: Into the Storm."  I've written two previous posts about how QAnon bears a lot of resemblance to religion. (See here and here.)  QAnon devotees are like religious believers. Neither cares about actual truth, while both pretend that they understand reality in a deep sense that eludes ordinary people. I found the HBO series fascinating. It shows us the people behind QAnon -- the computer geeks who administer the sites where Q posted his "drops," often enigmatic and usually totally wrong observations about politics and…
8
Posted inDelusions Politics Religions

QAnon is the religion of right-wing crazies

My wife and I have watched the first two episodes of HBO's "Q: Into the Storm" because we find QAnon both ridiculous and dangerous. Ridiculous, because QAnon faithful believe in absolutely crazy stuff -- such as Hillary Clinton and other Democrats operating a pedophile ring out of the basement of a Washington D.C. pizza restaurant. Dangerous, because so many followers of Trump in this country accept the QAnon insanity, including that mass arrests of Democrats will take place and the Orange One (Trump) will become president again. I can't recommend the HBO series because it is much more boring than…
7
Posted inReality Religions

Religions are sort of like conspiracy theories

Conspiracy theories always have been around. But they've proliferated, in the United States, at least, in recent years. Donald Trump deserves much of the credit, better termed blame.  Trump never saw a fact that he didn't like to denigrate, calling every media story which irritated him "fake news."  Of course, almost always there wasn't anything fake about the news. However, Trump's devotees came to feel like they were in a special club of People in the Know. Meaning, people who think they know what is really going on in the world. Which is much different from actually knowing. At the…
6
Posted inReligions

A message from someone finding purpose in Judaism, and my response

Recently I found a message from someone in the depths of my email inbox that I had ignored for a long time. I wrote back to them. A few days ago I got a reply, which I'm sharing below.  It's a well-written honest explanation of how they went from being non-religious to finding a sense of purpose and belonging in Judaism.  I can understand why someone would embrace the commandments/rules of a religion rather than struggling to find their own moral code, even though this doesn't make sense to me any more. After this person's message, minus their name, I've…
20
Posted inPolitics Religions

Religious nationalism must be fought, no matter the religion

Nationalism is dumb. Religious nationalism is dumber. Believing that your country is superior to all others makes no sense, since lots of people in many countries, maybe most countries, consider that they're fortunate to live in the best country on Earth. But at least there's no doubt that these countries exist. They have governments. They have boundaries. They can be photographed. So nationalism, as misguided as it is, has a foundation in objective reality. Religious nationalism, though, adds a fantasy -- the unproven belief that Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Sikhism, Buddhism, or some other religion is rooted in a supernatural…
7
Posted inBooks Religions Science

Science requires demonstrable evidence. Religion doesn’t.

Most mornings recently I've been reading a chapter from Michael Strevens' marvelous book, "The Knowledge Machine." It describes why science is so effective at understanding reality. I find the book inspiring, both scientifically and spiritually. Ever since I started this blog in 2004, I've been using the term demonstrable evidence frequently. Often I ask for that -- demonstrable evidence -- when someone makes a supernatural claim. Maybe they claim to have seen God, or something Godly. Maybe they claim to have experienced a cosmic realm beyond physical existence. Maybe they claim some sort of special power like ESP.  There are…
20
Posted inBooks Religions Science

The iron rule of science is empirical evidence

For thirty-five years I belonged to a religious organization that called itself, among other names, the "science of the soul." I liked this name at first, but eventually I began to wonder if the organization, Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), really understood what science was all about. After breaking away from RSSB in 2005, I kept asking on this blog if religious believers could provide demonstrable evidence of God, spirit, soul, heaven,  higher realms of reality, or any other supernatural entity. So far, I've gotten no such evidence.  Which isn't surprising, because if there was solid evidence of anything supernatural,…
5
Posted inPolitics Religions

Speak out! About politics, religion, everything.

Over on my Salem Political Snark blog, yesterday I wrote "Speak out about Trump's attempt to steal the election."  Almost certainly Trump won't succeed in this. His defeat was so large, extending over five states that he won in 2016 and lost in 2020 (Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia), there's no way lawsuits and recounts are going to overturn Biden's win. Still, it's important for everyone who cares about democracy to speak out against this attempt to thwart the will of voters, even if it has little chance of coming to pass. I shared some excerpts from a September 2020…
24