Posted inChristianity/Jesus Humor

Atheists, pray for the Patriots to beat Tim Tebow

Today is apocalyptic. God-loving quarterback Tim Tebow and his Denver Broncos play Tom Brady's New England Patriots in an important NFL playoff game.  This isn't only a football game. It's a battle with cosmic significance. Will in-your-face, obnoxious, Christian "Tebowing" win out, leading fundamentalists to believe that, indeed, God is on the Nuggets' side? Will a quarterback who says he's still a virgin (Tebow) triumph over a guy (Brady) who fathered a love child with another woman and now is married to supermodel Gisele Bundchen? God, I hope not! Like some of the Patriots, I'm tired of Tebow talk. So…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas

Sant Mat and Sikhism basically are the same

I used to think that the Sant Mat spirituality I followed for many years (in the guise of Radha Soami Satsang Beas) was truly a "science of the soul." Sure, I knew that Sant Mat and Sikhism were similar, but I attributed that more to culture than to religion. For example, the Sant Mat gurus let their hair grow and wear turbans, just as Sikhs do. However, the party line of Sant Mat was that it's a universal spiritual practice, a way back to God which transcends geography, nationality, historical religiosity, and such. Not really. In fact, not at all. As this…
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Posted inReality Spiritual practice/meditation

Mindfulness 101: separate your senses from your stories

Oh, the stories I tell myself. As do you. As does everybody. We wouldn't be human if we weren't story tellers.  I wake up in the morning. Almost immediately I recollect the basic narrative of my life. I live in Oregon. I'm married to the woman in bed next to me. I need to get up, raise the thermostat to 69 degrees, and let our dog out of the downstairs room where she spends the night. Then... make coffee, take the dog outside, get the newspapers. If I simply was aware of what my senses were telling me, I'd be…
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Posted inReligions Science

What would a new scientific religion look like?

The world needs a new religion. The ones we have are outdated. Every major religion -- Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism -- dates from prescientific days. Apple comes up with a new and improved iPhone every year or so. Why should we be content with ancient forms of spirituality concocted by people who didn't even know that the Earth revolves around the Sun, much less about quantum theory, relativity, the big bang, and evolution? Our old religions are deeply problematic. A short piece from the National Academy of Sciences on "Compatibility of Science and Religion" pinpoints the problem. Science and religion are…
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Posted inChristianity/Jesus

Tim Tebow’s “Tebowing” is religious obnoxiousness

I like Tim Tebow. Never met the Denver Bronco's quarterback, but when I've seen him interviewed on TV (Jon Stewart talked with him on The Daily Show fairly recently) Tebow comes across as humble and unassuming. But that's when he isn't "Tebowing," an irritating in-your-face display of his Christianity, where Tebow gets down on one knee, with his elbow resting on his other knee, head bowed in a prayerful stance. This has become a craze, with a web site devoted to Tebowing (including a Top Ten, naturally; the dog doing a modified version of the posture was the only photo…
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Posted inGod

Utterly unconvincing God experience

Wow, I've just wasted ten minutes of my life watching this ridiculousness. It's called Man dies, comes back to life, what he saw. Watch it at your peril. Somehow 2,931,978 people have, likely being sucked into doing so by a "check out this youtube video of a man who had what seems to be an NDE" like I got. No, he didn't have a near-death-experience. I didn't hear any mention of that. The guy suffered horrible injuries in a plane accident. He's lying in a hospital bed, probably drugged out of his mind, after going through a hugely traumatic event. So…
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Posted inScience

Brian Greene shows why science surpasses religion

Physicist Brian Greene has ably taken on Carl Sagan's role as TV's best popularizer of science. My wife and I thoroughly enjoyed his recent "Fabric of the Cosmos" series on PBS. I've read his book by the same name, as well as his recent "The Hidden Reality."  This afternoon, while exercising at an athletic club, I listened to an interview with Greene on a Point of Inquiry podcast. (I've discovered a bunch of interesting new podcasts to supplement my Philosophy Talk listening after spending $1.99 on the terrific Instacast iPhone app; highly recommended.) Listening to Greene talk with Chris Mooney,…
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Posted inSpiritual practice/meditation

“Nothing” is my spiritual resolution for the New Year

Yesterday some friends and I talked about our New Year's resolutions. The conversation didn't last long. We agreed there wasn't any point to making resolutions, since we never followed them.  That partly explains why my resolution for making spiritual progress in 2012 is pithy: nothing. No resolution, guaranteed success. I'm really great at doing nothing. Some days that's my primary accomplishment. But I also have some semi-serious reasons for recommending nothing as a spiritual goal. See here and here. As quoted in the first-linked "here," this saying on a Japanese Zen scroll makes a lot of non-sensical sense. There is…
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Posted inReality

Have a wonder-filled 2012!

Wonder. It's well, wonderful. What else could wonder be? Actually, quite a bit. That's a big part of the reason why wonder is wonderful, and why I'm wishing that for you, and for me, next year will be filled with it. I was inspired to strike this theme in my final blog post of 2012 by reading Paolo Costa's essay, "A Secular Wonder," in the book that I've blogged about previously: The Joy of Secularism: 11 Essays for How We Live Now. I love that Now in the sub-title. It's all that we have, even if we're engrossed in mulling over…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas Religions

I’m scolded for changing religions. But change happens.

Why is it that religious true believers are so upset when someone leaves their chosen faith? This confuses me, because many, if not most, members of a religion are converted -- either from a different religion or from unbelief. So it isn't surprising that the process of conversion often keeps on going. People can convert to another religion. Or deconvert from religious belief entirely. (See my "Deconversion is as natural as conversion.") Yesterday I got an email from someone who scolded me for -- shock! -- changing. Below I've shared what he said (minus his name), along with my reply…
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Posted inBooks Radha Soami Satsang Beas

“The Joy of Secularism” tells it truly

Every book I got for Christmas this year was just what I wanted, including The Joy of Secularism: 11 Essays for How We Live Now. That didn't surprise me. I'd ordered each myself, then gave them to my wife to wrap up. Such is akin to one of the book's central themes. We can either view meaning as coming from the outside, God being a commonly-perceived source, or from inside our own selves. These aren't hard and fast dichotomies, of course, just as my book selecting wasn't entirely of my own doing. I think a "Best Books of 2011" list…
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Posted inMiracles Reality

Don’t believe in miracles. Reality is better.

Late last night, while changing channels on our TV, I happened across a midnight mass that was being broadcast on ABC. After watching for a few minutes my wife and I were struck by how really weird the church service was.  Understand: it wasn't any weirder than any other religious form of worship. I'll give the Catholic priest credit for talking calmly and quietly, unlike more fervent evangelical preachers.  But what he was talking about seemed exceedingly strange to our rational, reasonable, evidence-loving psyches. Which was recognized by the priest (bishop, actually, if I recall correctly), because he spoke about…
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Posted inWu Project

Getting down to absolute nothing

Fans of nothingness (I'm one, and enjoy the company of Nothing'arians, but it's difficult to organize a fan club around nothing) should enjoy this letter in a recent issue of New Scientist.  It's in response to a special issue on the nature of nothingness that I blogged about last month. From Dave HowellsI found your articles on nothing interesting but dismaying (13 November, p. 40). Strictly speaking, none of them was about nothing. They surveyed the mathematical zero, empty sets, electronics, the quantum vacuum, and the noble gases. Nothing, I believe, is when we are unconscious. Say I have an…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories

Janis Joplin, vapor trails, and falling leaves

Oh, man, this has got to be a terrific post now that I've come up with that title. It's almost Christmas, so naturally my thoughts are turning toward utterly unreligious stuff. But I'm still getting signs from the universe. At least, I like to think that I am. And who else is better qualified to tell whether a seemingly random event actually is a message from... [fill in the blank; me, I have no idea who might be the messenger].   Like, yesterday I was driving around, listening to Classic Vinyl on Sirius XM, grooving to sounds of the '60s…
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Posted inReligions Spiritual practice/meditation

“Survivor: South Pacific” shows ridiculousness of religion

My wife and I are big Survivor fans. We've watched every episode of each season. "Survivor: South Pacific," which concluded last Sunday, was one of the most captivating series for this reality show. Also, one of the most annoying for us, because religion played a much larger role in the interactions between the people trying to outwit, outplay, and outlast (the Survivor mantra) each other on the island until one becomes the "sole survivor." One tribe was filled with obnoxiously explicitly devout Christians who regularly stood in a circle, held hands, prayed together -- and then proceeded to do their…
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Posted inSpiritual practice/meditation

The notion of a cosmic illusion is illusory

I loved "The Matrix." It's an entertaining movie with a compelling plot line. Eventually, Neo finds Morpheus, and is then told that reality is actually very different from what he, and most other people, perceives it to be. Morpheus tells Neo that human existence is merely a facade. In reality, humans are being ‘farmed’ as a source of energy by a race of sentient, malevolent machines. People actually live their entire lives in pods, wtih their brains being fed sensory stimuli which give them the illusion of leading ‘ordinary’ lives. Morpheus explains that, up until then, the “reality” perceived by Neo is…
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Posted inPlotinus Reality

Why materiality? What’s the point?

One of the reasons I love my blogging gig, even though I get paid precisely nothing, and even have to pay for the privilege of doing what I do, is getting email messages like this: I'm in the process of reading Return to the One which led me to your website and blogs.  Your writings have made me question, think, and laugh.  Thanks! I have spent many a year searching for something to satisfy this deep longing within.  I've known for sometime that I wasn't going to find "it" in the material world and have read zillions of books and tried various…
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Posted inBooks Science

God didn’t design the world. Neither do humans.

Scientifically-inclined people like me dismiss the idea of "intelligent design" when it is applied to the universe as a whole, or Earth in particular. It just is extremely unlikely that our world was designed by an intelligent being, rather than coming to be as it is through evolution's process of natural selection. Strangely, though, even most scientists assume that history is the record of how we humans have designed cultures, civilizations, and such. So intelligent design isn't accepted as an explanation for how the natural world came to be, but it is accepted as an explanation for how the "built"…
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