Posted inScience

Great video! “The Burden of Proof.” Claims demand evidence.

I just watched a terrific eleven minute You Tube video, "The Burden of Proof," that should be required viewing for everyone who believes in God, miracles, psychic powers, or anything else in the supernatural realm.  Also for those who challenge them. I highly recommend the video. This is the sort of clear thinking that cuts through religious bullshit like a razor sharp blade. It's no different from the prove it! and demonstrable evidence, please! pleas that I regularly utter to true believing commenters on this blog. The video just does a great job of demolishing the ridiculous notion that it…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories Spiritual practice/meditation

An atheist meditation that pleases God

I'm a believer. Not in God. But in "covering my bases." (For those unfamiliar with American English, this means being thoroughly prepared for something.) I don't believe in God. But I believe in the possibility that God exists. Heck, I believe in the possibility that anything imaginable exists. Along with what can't be imagined, just to cover my bases. That's because I'm scientifically minded. Contrary to how many religious people view science, actually it is science that is most open to reality in any form, any guise, any way of being. Material. Energetic. Non-physical. Mathematical. Ethereal. Conscious. Unconscious. Higher dimensional. Lower…
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Posted inReligions

Religion at root of opposition to gay marriage

Today is a happy moment for lots of gay people in Washington state, Oregon's neighbor to the north. Last month Washingtonians ratified the legislature's legalization of gay marriage. They also legalized marijuana -- which means that, as painful as it is for me to say this, I have to give Washington the edge over Oregon on "coolness" (cultural, not meteorological). Same sex people in Washington became eligible to get marriage licenses today. Their mood was celebratory, according to the Portland Oregonian. Who can blame them? As a harpist played in the lobby, excited couples converged on the Clark County auditor's…
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Posted inScience

Seeing red. Much more to this than meets the eye.

I love pondering Big Questions About the Cosmos. The stark existence of, well, existence is one of them, though I'm not sure if this is really a question. Maybe just a brute fact about which nothing more can be said.  (Along this line, recently I read a letter to the editor in New Scientist magazine arguing that circular reasoning, sort of like "existence exists," has to be the nature of a final truth. Otherwise there's always another truth along another link in a chain of causes/effects or reasoned explanations, and we never get to the end.) Sometimes, though, little questions…
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Posted inReality

Words are irrelevant to the cosmos

I'm walking along on a path to the lake, talking to one of our dogs. A habit of mine. Maybe inherited from my mother, since she also liked to talk to herself. Except when I talk to our dogs, I don't feel like I'm talking to myself. After all, there's a sentient being with large ears right next to me. Tonight, though, a marvelous intuition suddenly flashed into my consciousness. Virtually everything in the universe doesn't relate to words; apart from other people the cosmos doesn't give a crap about what we say. I'd never thought of speech in this…
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Posted inMiscellaneous

Extra-terrestrial meets an open-minded human

A regular blog commenter, "cc," sent me these thoughts recently. I enjoy writing like this: something I can read several times, and not exhaust the thoughtfulness contained therein. Reminds me a bit of Chuang Tzu's useless tree.  When the extra-terrestrial alights on Earth it says to the first human it encounters, "Take me to your leader", because it sees immediately that the human is not intelligent enough to live an unauthorized existence.  It is obvious to the extra-terrestrial that the human's slavish dependency on its knowledge renders it ignorant of the need for an open mind; that because it can't…
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Posted inGod Personal/Stories Spiritual practice/meditation

A cup of coffee is more real than God. Drink up!

There's so much to like about reality. It's got real stuff in it. Way cool. This is what makes living so satisfying. And so frustrating. Yet always interesting. We bump into real stuff that isn't us.  Maybe that bump is with an attractive sexual partner. Maybe it is with a mountain whose steep slopes challenge our climbing skills. Maybe it is with sitting still on a meditation cushion, aware of air going in and out of our nose. Maybe it is with cancer cells that have invaded our body. There's no end to the variety of encounters with physical reality.…
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Posted inMiscellaneous

Blog praise and nonduality criticism I agree with

Whenever I get an email from someone about this blog that has a first line with "love it," I'm inclined to agree with the rest of whatever is said. In this case, I have good reasons. Nicely said, dude. Just enough profanity to emphasize your points. Here's the guy's message, mildly edited to correct some spelling. I was just snooping around your site and gotta say..LOVE IT...I did manage to stumble across it a few years ago, but managed to turn a blind eye cause i couldnt have anyone fucking with my nonduality delusions..he he he..all these spiritual traditions are…
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Posted inReality

Would you choose to be hooked up to an Experience Machine?

The Experience Machine has popped into my life again. A few years ago I blogged about it in "Choose reality, not religion." Today I read about Robert Nozick's thought experiment again in Julian Baggini's "What's It All About: Philosophy and the Meaning of Life." Nozick asks us to imagine an experience machine, which works very much along the same lines as the eponymous supercomputer in the film The Matrix. Once plugged into the machine, you can live a life which from the inside feels just like normal life. Rocks feel hard, the sun bright, coffee hot, and so on. In…
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Posted inFree will Science

Sitting in the jury box, I deny free will

Ah, it was my first time to sit in the jury box as a prospective juror. I didn't want to waste my opportunity. Which, because I hate jury duty, was the opportunity to not be a real juror.  Yet I'd held my right hand up along with the other eleven people in the jury box (six were needed for the trial) as the judge swore us to tell the truth during the voir dire process of the defense and prosecuting attorneys questioning us prospective jurors about whether we could fairly decide the case (it involved menacing without physical contact). So…
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Posted inMorality

Petraeus affair reminds us that lust is the force of life

I love The New Yorker. No, more. I lust for it. When it arrives in the mail each week I feel tingly. Gazing fondly upon the cover image, I fondle the table of contents, looking forward to that magic moment when I'll fill up our bathtub with hot water, pour a glass of red wine, and slip into the dual liquid sensuousness with a magazine that features marvelous writers. Such as Adam Gopnik, who wrote a piece in the November 26, 2012 issue that spoke about General Petraeus' affair, and sexual morality in general, in a way that make me…
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Posted inScience

Brain has no outside authority

Free will, or rather the lack thereof, fascinates me. I've blogged about this subject a lot. (Couldn't help myself, for deterministic reasons.) In the December 2012 issue of Scientific American there's a letter about a recent Skeptic column by Michael Shermer. In the column it was argued that what humans really have is "free won't." Shermer says: But if we define free will as the power to do otherwise, the choice to veto one impulse over another is free won’t. Free won’t is veto power over innumerable neural impulses tempting us to act in one way, such that our decision to act…
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Posted inScience Universe

Scale of the universe makes belief in God look very small

I'm not religious. But if I were ever to embrace a religion, I'd want it to be a modern one. A scientific one. Meaning, a religion that seeks to explain whatever might lie beyond the physical universe without denying the reality of what does indisputably exist. The dogmas of every major world religion, though, date from prescientific times. Back then, most people believed that the Earth was the center of the cosmos. The Sun and stars orbited around our planet. We humans were special. Both in terms of our relation to the rest of the universe, and of our relation…
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Posted inMystics Spiritual practice/meditation

OPB’s “Rajneeshpuram” reminds me of Oregon’s guru weirdness

From 1981 to 1985 Oregon, where I live, was graced (if that's the right term) by the arrival of an Indian guru, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, whose followers founded a community in central Oregon: Rajneeshpuram. Last night my wife and I watched a recording of Oregon Public Broadcasting's hour long documentary of how the Rajnesshees rose and fell, "Rajneeshpuram." The full program can be watched online. I recommend it to anyone interested in the goods and bads of cults. That clearly is what Rajneeshpuram was, a cult. However, it's unclear to what extent the guru, who later changed his name to…
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Posted inReality Science Spiritual practice/meditation

How true are your religious predictions?

Today Nate Silver was called a "data god" in the Doonesbury comic strip. So I figure it's appropriate to honor his sacredness with another post about his fascinating book, "The Signal and the Noise." Silver is a hero of the reality-respecting community, of which I'm a proud member. He successfully predicted the outcome of the 2012 presidential election, getting the Obama vs. Romney winner correctly in all 50 states. Early on in his book, Silver talks about how we have a lot more information now, but this doesn't mean we have more knowledge. Meanwhile, if the quantity of information is…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas Science

Science loves being wrong. Religion hates it.

Are you sure you're right about something? Whether it is going to rain tomorrow; whether space aliens have visited Earth; whether God exists. Whatever. If so, you've got a religious attitude, even if you don't consider yourself to be religious. That's because science is never completely certain. Scientists always are open to having their ideas about reality disproved.  In short, they love being wrong. Indeed, says Steven Ross Pomeroy in his Scientific American blog post, "The Key to Science (and Life) is Being Wrong." A good scientist must be willing to be wrong. Such an inclination is liberating, for it…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories Science

Salem (Oregon) skeptics meet under Center for Inquiry banner

Last night my wife and I entered a den of secular, scientific skeptics. Not surprisingly, we enjoyed our first CFI Salem Humanists meeting. There was some sort of merging between the local Center for Inquiry and Humanist groups, but CFI seems to be the main banner under which they meet now. Laurel and I had read about the meeting, an honoring of Carl Sagan, in our local newspaper. We figured we'd meet some like-minded people. We figured right. There were quite a few other newbies in an upstairs room at the IKE Box coffeehouse. So it took a while for…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories Reality

Marvel at the Wizard of Is

With apologies to L. Frank Baum, I'm amending your book title for some philosophizing about "Is" rather than "Oz." I'm no longer religious. But I've still as awe-inspired as I ever was. What I find so awesome now isn't God, or guru, or any other imagined divinity. It's the inarguable presence of Is. No faith, no dogma, no theology, no anything is required to demonstrate the existence of Is. That's because Is is existence.  There Is is. Here Is is. Everywhere Is is. Awesome! Yet as obvious as Is is, what I really love about Is is how mysterious it is.…
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Posted inSpiritual practice/meditation

True life is lived when tiny changes occur

I hold a glass of red wine. I start to set it down on a wood table at a friend's house. I notice the tile coaster on which glasses are to be set. I pause to read a message on the coaster. True life is lived when tiny changes occur.   Leo Tolstoy  "Nice," I think. I take a sip of wine before putting the glass down. A tiny change. True life. Looking to confirm the quote, I found some other Tolstoy quotations that appealed to me.  Freethinkers are those who are willing to use their minds without prejudice and without…
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