Posted inMiracles Mystics Religions

Ross Douthat’s five varieties of mystical experience

I'm finding Ross Douthat's book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, less interesting now that I've gotten past the reasons Douthat offers for being religious, and have started to read how one goes about choosing a religion to believe in. However, in his "The Myth of Disenchantment" chapter, which is within the why believe section, his description of five varieties of mystical experience struck me as both fairly unique and mostly valid. I'll use Douthat's own words to describe those varieties rather than attempting a paraphrase. (1) Generic mystical experience.  The first is what you might call the generic mystical experience…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas

Photos of Gurinder Singh Dhillon, the RSSB guru, with rich and political people

Below I've shared twenty photos of the guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas, Gurinder Singh Dhillon, that were sent to me by someone who said: Hello Brian, I want to put your attention on one matter that effects on the heart of common satsangi, the matter is Why do Baba Gurinder Singh Dhillon and his intern Baba Gill like to visit only the houses of rich and political people and get photographed with them? Whereas none of them is a follower of Radhaswami cult and most of them are corrupt, jail inmates, non vegetarian, heavy drinker. Many of them are…
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Posted inNeuroscience Science

AI, artificial intelligence, points to the mystery of how the mind works

Religiously-minded people like to invoke mystery as a reason for believing in God and the supernatural. They adore how holy books teach that the workings of divinity are beyond human comprehension, you know, the whole man proposes and God disposes thing.  But it isn't necessary to go anywhere outside of the closest entity any of us has to ourselves to come face-to-face with a gigantic mystery, because that entity is the mind that experiences both mystery and everything else from our birth until our death. In my previous post, "No, neuroscience doesn't support religiosity,"  I included a passage from Ross…
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Posted inConsciousness Neuroscience

No, neuroscience doesn’t support religiosity

A trend is evident. With every fresh blog post I set out to write about Ross Douthat's book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, I have an urge to start off the title with "No." Obviously that's because I don't believe everyone should be religious, and Douthat's arguments in favor of that aren't very convincing. Still, I enjoy being exposed to ideas that I disagree with. Not as a steady diet, but as tasty morsels occasionally. Douthat does about as well as could be expected with his ambitious goal: not to found religiosity on faith, but to a large extent upon…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories

Pieces of churchless string too short to save

Many years ago, in that far-off time when local newspapers were much more vibrant and successful than they are now, our town's paper, the Salem Statesman Journal, had a column written by someone who occasionally started his piece with "pieces of string too short to save." Meaning, he was going to mention a bunch of unrelated things in his column that day, each of which was interesting, but didn't merit taking up the entire column. Today I figured I'd dust that saying off and do my blog post imitation of it, otherwise known as three-dot writing. ...Yesterday I heard from…
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Posted inReligions Science Universe

No, the big bang doesn’t point to a divine creator

In my first post a few days ago about Ross Douthat's book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, I said that I bought the book because "I was curious about how Douthat would make his arguments, figuring that it would be easy for atheists like me to undermine them." Here I'll finish my critique of his first substantive chapter, "The Fashioned Universe," which I started making in that initial post about the book.  It's easy for me to do this, because I'm already seeing a theme emerge in how Douthat tries to make his case for religious belief. Though he's…
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Posted inAtheism Religions

“Believe” is a book that claims religions are true. I doubt it can do that.

I bought Ross Douthat's book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, not because I agree with that thesis. Rather, I was curious about how Douthat would make his arguments, figuring that it would be easy for atheists like me to undermine them. After reading 25 pages, I'm impressed with Douthat's lofty goal, but not with his reasoning so far. Being a New York Times opinion columnist and a former senior editor at The Atlantic, it isn't surprising that Douthat is a talented writer. He makes his points clearly. So kudos to him for that. And I admire how in his…
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Posted inBuddhism Spiritual practice/meditation

Here’s the best description of Zen koans I’ve ever seen

Koans are an aspect of Zen Buddhism that I've always looked upon as wonderfully mysterious, yet unappealing. For in traditional Zen writings I'd read about a student being given a koan like "Does a dog have buddha nature?" Then they struggled to figure out what the answer is, periodically having a get-together with their Zen master for him to see how they're doing, where usually he rejects their lame attempt at a response by hitting them on the head with his staff or screaming at them. Not exactly something that sounds either pleasant or productive to me.  But near the…
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Posted inMorality Politics

Empathy is a sign of maturity, which is why Trump is so childlike

It's difficult to define morality, or for that matter, to define any other characteristic that most people would agree is part of being a decent human being. But that shouldn't stop us from speaking about morality, since common sense and intuition are a pretty good guide here. In the February 2025 issue of Scientific American, there's an article about how the adolescent mind develops, "Growing the Adolescent Mind."  The geeky details are interesting. However, what caught my eye was the mention of transcendence, which I usually think of as referring to something in the religious or spiritual sphere. After all,…
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Posted inBuddhism Reality Religions

Science is the best guide to spirituality

Some people believe that science is opposed to spirituality, that these pursuits operate in different realms of reality and an embrace of one implies a distancing from the other. I've never believed this. Even when I was in my most religious frame of mind, the 35 years I was an active member of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), an India-based religious organization headed up by a guru considered to be God in Human Form, I remained intensely interested in what science has learned about our universe even as I explored the possibility of realms beyond the physical. This is why…
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Posted inBuddhism

It’s great that a Zen master can be an atheist

[Before I get into the subject of this blog post, a note about keeping to the subject in comments on my blog posts. I just had to unpublish a comment on my previous post about the need to choose a religion, as the comment was related 100% to a defense of an outrageous action by the Trump administration that I wrote about last night on my Salem Political Snark blog. I'm fine with some mildly off-topic comments, but not those completely unrelated to the subject of a blog post, as that is highly confusing to anyone reading such a comment.…
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Posted inGod Religions

Opinion piece makes me wonder, why choose a religion at all?

Today I came across a New York Times opinion piece by Ross Douthat, "Looking for Faith? Here's a Guide to Choosing a Religion." (That link should open for everybody, being a gift article from my online subscription; if not, here's a PDF file.)Download Opinion | Looking for Faith? Here’s a Guide to Choosing a Religion. - The New York Times Douthat, a regular NYT columnist, based his piece on a book he's written that has a release date later this month: Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. While I obviously don't share this assumption, being an atheist, I just put…
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Posted inAwareness Mindfulness

Everyone is a creator, says Rick Rubin

I've done a lot of creating in my life. But I've never thought of myself as an artist. Artists create paintings, music, sculptures, pottery, all that stuff that most people, including me, think are art'y. Rick Rubin is leading me to expand that limited point of view. Recently I encountered Rubin when I was watching some episodes of 60 Minutes that I'd recorded and hadn't gotten around to viewing. The segment on Rubin was fascinating. Here's a guy who claims to know nothing about music, yet is a highly successful record producer. (These days maybe it's more accurate to say…
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Posted inAtheism Religions

Why it can be easy to talk with someone who has very different beliefs than you do

In these divisive times marked by so much animosity between people who believe in radically different things, whether these be in a religious, political, or some other "hot button" area, it was refreshing for me to read a book with a core message that deeply resonated with me.  Namely, that it can be easier to share ideas with someone on the opposite side of a dualistic spectrum -- liberal vs. conservative in the realm of politics, believer vs. atheist in the realm of religion -- than to converse with someone who believes very much as you do. Tim Urban explains…
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Posted inFundamentalism Politics

Cults can be political as well as religious

Here in the United States we're watching the Cult of Trump expand its hold on people who used to be independent thinkers and believers in democracy, but now have become total sycophants to a man who stands for nothing except his authoritarian impulses. This shows that cults come in different forms, not just of the religious variety. Unfortunately, we humans are prone to excessive loyalty toward our own "tribe." When this happens, truth is sacrificed on the altar of self-interest, something that has been on full display ever since Trump appeared on the national political stage, yet is even more…
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Posted inMiracles Science

Miracles aren’t so miraculous in the light of mathematics

We humans have some innate amazing capabilities. However, intuitively grasping mathematical principles, including statistics and probability theory, isn't one of them. Or at least, this is very rare. That's why almost everybody mistakenly overestimates the rarity of unusual events. I wrote about this in a 2014 post, "Miracles" happen all the time. Mathematics demands them. In that post I included this question from a book I was reading: How many people must be in a room to make it more likely than not that two of them share the same birthday? The answer is 23. I would have thought the…
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Posted inBuddhism Mindfulness

I like the idea that love is akin to spaciousness

Love. What is it? For me, love has been easier to feel than to describe. It seems to have something to do with attraction, since I want to be closer to people and things that I love, while the opposite is true of people and things that I hate or dislike. Every night I say "love you" to my wife before we go to sleep. She says the same to me. It's a ritual that means a lot to me, in part because it makes me feel good to know that if I die in my sleep, those would have…
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Posted inBuddhism Mindfulness

We are both the mind and the observer of the mind

Recently I read an essay in either the New York Times or Washington Post by someone who spoke about how Thich Nhat Hanh's classic little book, "The Miracle of Mindfulness," had changed his life.  That spurred me to head to Amazon to see if I'd already bought that book. Yes, Amazon told me, you did, in January 2019. Looking through the Buddhism section of my bookcase, there it was, all 139 pages of it. I've been re-reading parts of The Miracle of Mindfulness the past few days. Published 50 years ago, in 1975, the book is wonderfully clear and concise.…
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Posted inMorality Politics

Germany surviving Hitler doesn’t reassure me about Trump

I don't believe that evil exists. At least, not in the way that word typically is used, as someone or something with wholly negative qualities that border, if not actually inhabit, a dualistic metaphysical realm where Good is inherently opposed to Evil as opposite cosmic forces.   I do believe that sometimes people do really bad things. Not because they are evil. Because they are people with both the capability and the intention to do those bad things.  Murder. Rape. Torture. Whether those who carry out horrendous acts like these do so of their free will, or via deterministic causes,…
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Posted inBuddhism Mindfulness

The goal is our chosen direction, says Zen master Henry Shukman

I think it'd be cool to be a Zen master. However, to do that I would have had to actually practice Zen under the guidance of a Zen master, rather than admire Zen from the outside and practice it in my own idiosyncratic fashion. Henry Shukman, who wrote the book Original Love that I'm reading now, and fashioned The Way app on my iPhone that I've using every morning in a cyberspace form of Zen meditation, is indeed a Zen master. I just checked out the Sanbo Zen International web site and Shukman is listed there along with other masters…
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