Posted inGod Science

Religion’s bad arguments against the big bang

The day after I wrote my previous blog post, "Mystery of existence eludes both religion and science," I returned to reading Michael Shermer's new book, The Believing  Brain. I came across a section in his "Belief in God" chapter that reminded me of points made in my post -- which isn't surprising, given that (1) Shermer's arguments are fairly obvious, and (2) almost certainly Shermer and I have read the same ungodly books by Dawkins, Hitchens, Dennett, and other religious skeptics. Have a read: The problem we face with the God question is that certainty is not possible when we…
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Posted inReality Science Universe

Mystery of existence eludes both religion and science

"Why is there something rather than nothing?" This is the ultimate question. So ultimate'y, it shouldn't be viewed as a question, because questions imply answers. I prefer, "There is something rather than nothing." Leave out the "why." Embrace the stark, unarguable reality of existence. Forget God. Something must exist or God couldn't exist. So my awe is directed toward existence, not God. Existence is everlasting, eternal, omnipresent, unfathomable. Wild! If I want to feel a tingle up my psyche's spine before I fall into sleep, I ponder there is something rather than nothing as I doze off. (Some reflections of…
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Posted inReality Science

The three wisest words in the world: “I don’t know”

I've got some affirmations for you that will change your life. Repeat them over and over in your mind until they seem to be part and parcel of you. Because in truth, they already are. "I don't know." "I'm clueless.""I have no idea what's going on.""It's all a mystery to me." None of us knows how we know. That's a neuroscientific fact. I talked about this a few years ago in Knowing that you know: impossible. This blog post was based on a terrific book by Robert Burton, "On Being Certain." One of Burton's central points, which seems as certain…
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Posted inReality Spiritual practice/meditation

Get loopy! Feel better fast with feedback loops

Old religious habits can take a long time to die. As churchless as I am these days, sometimes I long for a "revival." The faith to which I previously subscribed was Eastern rather than Western, so my notion of a revival was to attend a weekend meeting where speakers (maybe even the guru himself) would urge devotees to apply themselves to meditation and other spiritual practices/vows more assiduously. I enjoyed feeling that I had a clear-cut spiritual goal, and that if I did this-and-that, such-and-such results could be expected. Maybe not soon; maybe not even in this lifetime; but someday…
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Posted inGod

Brilliant academics talk about God

Thanks to Pharyngula, I just made a start on watching an interesting You Tube video that features fifty super-smart people talking about why they don't believe in God. So far I've only listened to ten of the fifty academics. I like what I've heard. Some Pharyngula commenters noted that almost all of the people in the video are older white guys. For some reason I'm not offended by this at all. Anyway, they make great good sense. There's so much religious crap being spread around the world these days, it's nice to be exposed to some intelligent, reasonable, rational talk…
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Posted inReality Religions

For me, “getting real” means getting rid of religion

What are you doing when you feel the most real? What makes you exclaim, "Wow, that was real!" What circumstances lead you to feel, If I were to die now, I'd die content? Obviously only you can answer those questions. All I want to do is raise them,  because I think they're well worth pondering. If life isn't filled with really real moments, are we truly living? For me, reality seems most vibrant, clear, energetic, and alluring when I'm engaged in a physical activity that has an edgy aspect to it. "Edgy" is a term that's hard to pin down.…
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Posted inReality Science

Mathematics is both invented and discovered

I'm fascinated by the question of whether the laws of nature are "out there" in an objective external world, or "in here" within the subjective confines of the human brain. A recent post on my other blog about male/female conversation styles mentions how I'd talk about this topic with another philosophically-minded man. When men talk, most of the time they aren't trying to either reveal, or gain access to, inner feelings. My wife and I used to get another with another couple. The other guy and I would converse in one corner of our living room, while the wives huddled…
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Posted inBuddhism

How Zen’s nonduality is confirmed by neuroscience

Every morning I experience in a concrete fashion the tension between science and spirituality. In my meditation area I always have several books available for my morning caffeinated reading. Some are scientific -- about neuroscience, evolution, global warming. Others are spiritual -- mostly books on Buddhism, Taoism, mindfulness. There are days when I start reading a science book and it seems too dryly factual. Others days I'll pick up a spiritual book and find it annoyingly airy-fairy, dogmatic, or preachy. So often I'll bounce back and forth between several titles, searching for science with a poetic soul and for spirituality…
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Posted inSpiritual practice/meditation

Touching is sacred, in an ungodly sense

Religious believers often are distrustful of getting too touchie-feelie. Ooh, bodies meeting, melding, melting into each other! That's so, um, bodily. God is all ethereal, otherworldly, spiritual. Bodies, bad. God, good. That's a thoroughly dualistic attitude, of course. Which is more than a little strange, since most religions spout stuff like "God is one," "All is God," and "God is everywhere." I've known true believers who said they couldn't wait to be rid of their body. They imagined that life in a heavenly realm would be so much better than existence in this crude physical world. Even when I was deep…
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Posted inMystics Radha Soami Satsang Beas

India’s “godmen” face questions about their wealth

Interesting story in the Washington Post about how spirituality has become a lucrative profession for Indian gurus and yogis.  For centuries, their image was as barefoot ascetics who spent their lives in solitary Himalayan meditation. But now India’s gurus, “miracle workers” and spiritual leaders, often collectively known as “godmen,” have become savvy, powerful figures who control vast philanthropic and business empires, dabble in politics and manipulate the media. There's no mention of Gurinder Singh Dhillon, guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas. But he's another good example of the trend toward making lots of money while preaching detachment from material pursuits.…
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Posted inMorality Religions

Atheism promotes human dignity and truth-seeking

While exercising today I listened to a podcast of the Philosophy Talk program, "Atheism and the Well-Lived Life." The guest philosopher was Louise Antony, who edited Philosophers Without Gods -- one of whom is Ken Taylor, a regular host of the program. For me the most interesting comment of the program came from Antony. She was asked a question by a woman in the audience that went something like this: As an atheist, what would you say to someone who is suffering, who has serious problems? Excellent question. Religion offers consolations for people who aren't having a pleasant life. Most…
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Posted inSpiritual practice/meditation

Go on a belief diet. You’ll feel lighter and happier.

Most of us are concerned about putting on a few (or many) physical pounds. We correctly recognize that carrying around extra unnecessary weight is unhealthy, unattractive, and unpleasant. But when it comes to psychological excess baggage, such as unneeded religious, spiritual, philosophical, mystical, or New Age'y beliefs, we aren't as worried about how all that "fat" is affecting us. Well, it does. So I'm recommending a belief diet -- paring down our craving for what Michael Shermer terms "patternicity" and "agenticity," two strong appetites in every human brain. The brain is a belief engine. From sensory data flowing in through…
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Posted inScience

Believing comes first, reasons and evidence follow

Most of us like to believe that our beliefs are well-founded. It's the other guy who isn't looking at the evidence, is drawing false conclusions, has his or her head in the sand while we're staring straight at reality. Well, that's an unfounded belief. Each of us, everyone on Earth, is prone to making wrong conclusions. Michael Shermer explains why in his new book, "The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and God to Politics and Conspiracies -- How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths." The brain is a belief engine. From sensory data flowing in through the senses the…
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Posted inScience Spiritual practice/meditation

How to be happy without a soul

I'm pretty much convinced that I don't have a soul. If it shows up one day like a lost puppy that managed to find its way home, I'll be pleasantly surprised. (At least, if it wags its tail and licks my face.) Quite a while ago I gave up the search for my self, impelled in part by a source of great spiritual wisdom, The Onion, which told the tale of another guy who did the same thing. As neuroscience learns more and more about how the brain functions, my decision appears increasingly wise to me. Of course, what else…
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Posted inHumor Spiritual practice/meditation

Roseanne Barr’s meditation approach sounds good to me

In a Newsweek story, "Roseanne Mouths Off (Again)," Roseanne Barr's rather untraditional Judaic approach to meditation is described. Barr’s hair has gone gray and she has feather hair extensions—she looks like a hippie (check), grandma (check), stoner (check: every Friday night for Shabbat from sundown until 2 a.m., she gets high, drinks red wine, and does a meditation Rav Berg taught her). Nice. My only question is what proportion of time each activity takes from sundown until 2 am. I could follow this form of Kabbalah if, say, sundown was at 8 pm and the pot-smoking/wine-drinking lasts until 1:40 am,…
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Posted inBuddhism Morality

Shun extremes. Usually. (Be moderate in shunning also.)

The past few days I've made my way through all of David Chapman's "Meaningness" online book, which I first blogged about here. Since I'm a habitual highlighter of print books, it's been an interesting change of pace to page through screen after screen on my laptop without making any important!, I like!, or hmmmmm... marks. All of the markings have been in my mind. So I'll consult my memory and share what has struck me the most about what Chapman says in his scientifically Buddhist'y fashion: Life is best lived between extremes. But let's not make that adage into something…
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Posted inBuddhism

David Chapman’s dizzying writings on Meaningness and Buddhism

I don't often use the word "dizzying." Especially in the title of a blog post. Here, I mean it as a compliment, in the sense of... giddy, bewildering. Those are good things when it comes to writings that attempt to get at What Life is All About. Because if we think we understand what life is all about, we don't. Today someone sent me an email. Wanted to make sure you've seen this one:http://meaningness.wordpress.comas he is a wonderful writer *and* touches on subjects that seem to be dear to your heart. Instead of reading a book during my pre-meditation time…
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Posted inSpiritual practice/meditation

Blind faith takes many forms

Having started this churchless blog way back (in Internet time) in 2004, I've been able to follow a lot of interesting comment conversations about many subjects related to God, soul, spirit, consciousness, life after death, and such. Naturally I've also been able to follow the continuing progress of my own irreligious evolution. In both cases -- looking at how other people regard supernaturalism, and how I do -- I'm struck by how difficult it is for us humans to let go of blind faith. Religious true believers who come to embrace agnosticism or atheism find it fairly easy to discard…
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Posted inBooks Science

“The Ego Trick” — selves exist, but not as we believe

Who are we? Is there an essential "me"? Am I an unchanging self? I'm fascinated by these sorts of questions. Ever since I started practicing yoga and meditation more than forty years ago, I've been trying to understand who or what I am. For much of that time I believed in the adage, "self-realization before God-realization." Yet as I said in a blog post, Religions are wrong about self-realization: But the fact remains that whatever our "self" may be, it isn't something simple, obvious, supernatural, or transparently evident to awareness. So this makes traditional religious/spiritual notions of self-realization laughably out…
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