Posted inBooks Science

Free will doesn’t exist. Compatibilism makes no sense.

I don't believe in free will. I've got good neuroscientific company, which includes Sam Harris, author of "Free Will." (See here and here for my previous blogging about the book.) Reading a New York Times review of "Free Will," I was reminded of how the have-it-both-ways notion of compatibilism doesn't make sense to me. Compatibilism claims that free will and determinism are compatible. Huh? is my reaction. Harris' also, according to the review. For quite a while now, philosophers and public intellectuals, including Harris’s friend Dennett, have tried to rescue something like the common notion of free will from the…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas Religions

I’m not bitter toward religion — just fed up with false claims

Fairly frequently true believers leave comments on this blog saying, "Brian, you're so bitter toward religion." This surprises me.  I don't feel bitter toward any religion or spiritual organization, including Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), the India-based group I was an active member of for about thirty-five years. Rather, I'm disappointed about the false claims RSSB promotes in its teachings. If I buy a car, or a computer, I expect it will function as advertised. If it doesn't, I don't feel bitterness. Just irritation, disappointment, let-down. Now, how do I know that RSSB, or any religion, makes false claims? I…
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Posted inReality Religions Science

Morality has nothing to do with scientific truth

Einstein revealed some amazing truths about the cosmos through his theory of relativity and other research. Einstein also spent time with six girlfriends while he was married.  Is there any connection between these two facts? Should we question the validity of the theory of relativity because Einstein engaged in behavior that would seem morally questionable to many people?  No, of course not.  Universal scientific truths have no connection with individual, or even societal, moral norms. The cosmos doesn't care what we do with our bodies and minds. Laws of nature aren't dependent on human thou shalt's and thou shalt not's.…
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Posted inBuddhism Spiritual practice/meditation

What Zen practice is… so simple…

I've been reading Zen books since my college days, forty-four years. I go hot and cold with Zen. Never have heated up enough to study it formally. Never have cooled off enough to lose interest in it entirely. When an author throws too much Buddhism into the mix of Zen + Buddhism, I get turned off. I like my Zen to be as non-religious as possible.  Which explains why Charlotte Joko Beck's "Nothing Special" appeals to me so much. I learned about the book from an interesting blog post by David Chapman with the same name.  I took the title…
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Posted inScience

Discovery of “God particle” has nothing to do with God

Bravo, CERN scientists! It looks like you've found evidence of the Higgs boson, a particle produced by knocking a tiny chunk out of space-time with a high-energy particle accelerator. This discovery could answer the question, "Where does mass come from?" That is, why is there something we can point to and say there!, rather than everything being formless pure energy? According to the Standard Model, the Higgs boson is the only manifestation of an invisible force field, a cosmic molasses that permeates space and imbues elementary particles with mass. Particles wading through the field gain heft the way a bill going…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories

Does God want me to be a senior citizen skateboarder?

There's got to be a deep meaning behind my strangely strong desire to become a skateboarder, longboarding style, at the age of 63.  After all, don't the world's Western religions tell us that God/Allah is in control of our lives? And don't the world's Eastern religions tell us that Karma/Tao guides our decisions?  Thus I have to assume that if I follow through on my lust for longboarding, I will have taken another step toward my salvation, enlightenment, god-realization, satori, and overall Major Dude'ness.  (For some background on my divine mission, see here and here.) Now, so far I haven't…
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Posted inReligions

Religion and politics: where lies triumph over facts

Fascinating. Reading Leonards Pitts' column in today's Oregonian opinion page, it almost seemed as if he was talking about religion in "When lies triumph over facts, we're done." All I had to do was mentally substitute a few words in key passages. Which I've done non-mentally below. Not long ago, if you told a whopper like Palin’s a holy book's and it was as thoroughly debunked as hers it's was, that would have ended the discussion. These days, it is barely even part of the discussion. These days, facts seem overmatched by falsehood, too slow to catch them, too weak to stop them. Indeed,…
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Posted inBooks Spiritual practice/meditation

You wanted old answers, not new questions

It makes sense... to try to make sense out of what makes sense. But if something is senseless, trying to make sense out of it is... (drumroll, please) senseless.  Such is the mystery of life. Such is the mystery of the cosmos. Such is the mystery of ourselves. To be wondered, not made sense of.  Jack Haas is a guy who loves wonder, mystery, senselessness. So do I. I've blogged about Haas and his stimulating books here and here. And... here I go again.  Recently I got Haas' book, The Dream of Being -- aphorisms, ideograms, and aislings. (An aisling is a…
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Posted inReality Religions

Matt Thornton, mixed martial artist, kicks religion’s butt

I love how the World Wide Web leads in so many interesting unexpected directions. Like, from a brief Sam Harris twitter tweet to the blog of a guy who is both physically and intellectually capable of twisting religious believers into knots. I started off listening to an interview Bobby Nelson, "The Paranormal Skeptic," conducted with Matt Thornton, a mixed martial artist and coach from Portland, Oregon -- just a short ways up I-5 from Salem, the much less cool city where I live. You can listen to it here. Great stuff. I've been involved with martial arts for almost twenty…
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Posted inBuddhism Death/Rebirth

Uncertainty: the key to dealing with death and non-existence

Last night I had another of my Holy shit! I'm going to die and not exist forever! moments. I wrote about these disturbing experiences six years ago in "Death and the primal fear of non-existence."  I’ve come face to face with not-existing. It’s scary. Really scary. I’ve never experienced anything scarier. I can call it “fear,” but it’s more than that. Worse than that. Regular fear arises when something bad is happening or could happen. But primal fear is looking into the maw of nothing happening to you, because there will be no you around for anything to happen to. Do you get the…
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Posted inBuddhism Spiritual practice/meditation

How to move between horizontal and vertical time

Memories are strange. I've forgotten so much about the past, yet some memories have stuck with me in a surprising fashion. Fairly early in my meditating years (I've meditated daily since 1970), I'd attend talks by Gordon Limbrick, a Canadian. He habitually offered three pieces of advice: "Keep your back straight; smile inwardly; visualize a trap door opening in the ceiling of your mind." I liked all three tips back then. I still think of them now. With some variations. Such as visualizing myself opening a trap door on the ground floor of my body also. This reflects my Tai Chi…
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Posted inGod

God-man useless compared to Human-man

Came across this great comic in a Daily Kos post. Reminded me of some ridiculous "God is in control of everything" stuff a Christian was quoted as saying in my previous post. If God-man is so powerful, why does Human-man fail to find him helping out?
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Posted inFundamentalism God

Why a Christian woman denies global warming

My wife, Laurel, has been engaging in an exchange of emails with a Christian woman who used to do the same thing with Laurel's sister -- try to convince a religious skeptic that the Bible is God's inerrant truth. Which, of course, is complete bullshit.  As is this woman's response, after Laurel noted that viewers of Fox News are horribly misinformed about the reality of global warming. She replied: It is because I am a Christian that I don't believe in global warming.   My wife then emailed her: I am curious why being a Christian causes you to reject…
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Posted inBooks Spiritual practice/meditation

“We each belong to the energy of the moment” — Jack Haas

Jack Haas wrote one of my favorite books about the meaning of life, and the lack thereof: "The Way of Wonder." Like I said in a blog post stimulated by the book: It's been a steady substitution. The less I've filled myself with organized religion, the more I've felt a ever-increasing sense of wonder. I guess I needed to empty myself of theological beliefs, faith-based concepts, and imaginary anticipations of a promised divinity around the corner in order to become much more aware of the Wow! that is right here, right now. Existence. Life. Consciousness. The amazing fact that we are, that the cosmos is.…
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Posted inMorality

Moral relativism linked with openness to experience

By and large, I'm a moral relativist. This fits with my irreligious inclinations. I don't believe in the Ten Commandments, or any set of moral codes that supposedly emanated from a divine, supernatural, or more-than-human source. I think Sam Harris got it mostly right in his book, "The Moral Landscape." Even though I lean toward moral relativism, I agree with Harris that human flourishing is the standard by which moral decisions should be made. He writes: Meaning, values, morality, and the good life must relate to facts about the well-being of conscious creatures -- and, in our case, must lawfully…
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Posted inReality Religions

Are humans capable of fully comprehending the cosmos?

It's a marvelous quest, our oh-so-human desire to fully understand the mysteries of the cosmos. Dogs don't do this. Chimpanzees don't do this. Dolphins don't do this. (So far as we know.) Science and religion are alike in this regard: each seeks knowledge, as much as possible. Scientists aspire to the discovery of a Theory of Everything which encompasses the core laws of nature. Prophets, mystics, gurus, yogis, and other spiritual seekers hope to know the "mind of God," perhaps even becoming it via enlightenment. Yet there's an egotistical, anthropomorphic, humancentric undercurrent to these attempts to reveal ultimate reality. We…
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Posted inBooks Spiritual practice/meditation Universe

My Amazon review of “The Mystery Experience”

Killing two birds with one stone (or rather, slicing two pieces of tofu with one knife, since I'm an animal-loving vegetarian), I'm going to talk about my overall impression of Tim Freke's The Mystery Experience in the form of an Amazon reader review. I read a lot more Amazon reviews than I write. This will help make up for that imbalance. Usually I'm only drawn to submit a review on books that I liked a lot. Such is true with The Mystery Experience, which I've blogged about before here, here, here, and here. But "liking" isn't the same as "agreeing with."…
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Posted inBooks Spiritual practice/meditation

Spiritual perfection is an illusion. Simply be human.

A few posts ago, in "Allow cosmic mystery to live, not killing it with religion," I talked about what I didn't like about Tim Freke's book, The Mystery Experience. Now I want to share some passages that made me think right on when I read them. Yes, I had a few quibbles with what Freke said, but in general I agreed wholeheartedly with him. After embracing forms of spirituality that emphasized detaching from the world to reach a state of transcendent perfected enlightenment, Freke has seen the light. Not a heavenly radiance, but the illumination that comes from embracing what…
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Posted inScience

Untrue intuitions lead people to not believe in science

Religious people often claim that believing in God is a difficult path to follow, since it goes against the ways of the world. Actually, understanding the truth about materiality is a lot tougher than embracing spiritual falsities. If you doubt this, check out an interesting New Yorker article by Jonah Lehrer, "Why We Don't Believe in Science." The main conclusion I drew from the piece is this: if our intuitions about how the physical world works often are so wrong, why should we believe that our intuitions about God, heaven, soul, spirit, and other aspects of a supposed spiritual world…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas

Guru Gurinder Singh Dhillon’s teachings: a logical look

Here's a blunt, honest, and amusing reaction to some questions and answers of an Indian guru, Gurinder Singh Dhillon, who is considered to be "God in human form" by devotees.  The author is well-known, Anonymous. (Isn't me, I can assure you.) Gurinder Singh Dhillon heads up Radha Soami Satsang Beas, or RSSB, which is termed Really Stupid Shitty Bullshit in this PDF document: Download Gurinder Singh Dhillon questions  The questions and answers apparently are authentic, having been circulated among RSSB members. The caustic commentary on the Q and A is one person's logical reaction to some religious illogic.
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