Posted inBooks Humor Religions

Hell joke’s serious side

A friend recently emailed me the “Chemistry of hell” joke that has been circulating on the Internet for years, though I couldn’t recall having seen it before. The version that I got is in the continuation to this post. The joke seems to be evolving, as it now has a nice “Oh, my God!” paragraph at the end that earlier versions didn’t have.

As humorous as this story is, it has some deep philosophy in it. Notably, the idea that since most religions state that anyone who isn’t a member of that faith is going to hell, and few (if any) people belong to every religion in the world, then everyone is going to hell.

I thought of this joke as I was reading a message from a Muslim student who attended a lecture by Sam Harris. Harris wrote “The End of Faith,” a book that I praised on my other weblog after reading only 30 pages. After finishing the book, my initial favorable impression only grew stronger.

As the student writes, Harris boldly attacks all religions as being equally non-sensical and opposed to a truly spiritual view of the world, fellow human beings, and ourselves. What made me think about hell is her observation that bodyguards were present during Harris’ talk. Would a scientist who criticized an unfounded theory need protection from those who believed in it?

Hell isn’t a real place like Death Valley in the summertime. It is the manmade creation of religions. It is as real as the irrational untested beliefs of religious fundamentalists. Yet this illusion has its all-too-real effects: people who question religious dogma need bodyguards to protect them from believers in a loving God.

To me, this absurdity is what’s truly hellish.

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Posted inBooks Christianity/Jesus Politics

“God’s Politics” a timely book

The author of “God’s Politics,” Jim Wallis, was on the Daily Show recently. I don’t often recommend a book before I’ve read it (or, in this case, even seen it), but I am now. Wallis struck me as intelligent, devout, caring, and open-minded. His cause is freeing religious involvement in politics from right-wing Republican confines. Wallis called himself an evangelical Christian. He considers that the entire Bible, not just selected smatterings from here and there, should be the foundation for how a Christian melds religion and politics. He said that Jesus spoke about caring for the poor much more often…
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Posted inBooks God Mystics

Plotinus: Vision

For more than eight years I’ve been a close friend of a long-dead Greek philosopher, Plotinus. Obviously I haven’t sat down and talked with him directly, but I feel like I have, so intensely and intimately have I studied his teachings in the course of writing a book: “Return to the One: Plotinus’s Guide to God-Realization.” Plotinus is the last of five mystics that I’ve been writing about. Each is a worthy “patron saint” for the churchless, and each exhibits a special quality that I try to describe in a single word. For Plotinus it is vision. I’ve read countless…
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Posted inGod Politics

Lincoln, Bush, and God’s will

After I wrote my previous “Prayer is irreverent” post I came across a wonderful passage written by Abraham Lincoln in 1862, a meditation on the divine will. It begins like this: The will of God prevails. In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be, wrong. God cannot be for and against the same thing at the same time. In the present civil war it is quite possible that God's purpose is something different from the purpose of either party. Contrast these elevated and subtle sentiments with…
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Posted inChristianity/Jesus God

Prayer is irreverent

Being a man, it’s easy for me to imagine that I’ve got God-like qualities, at least when it comes to omnipotence and omniscience. Every evening I wield the TV remote control with amazing grace. What I will to appear on the screen does, and my ability to use the DISH Network’s “find” command is nothing short of miraculous (to those who don’t bother to read manuals, at least, a group that includes my wife). So I feel qualified to speak for God: “It really irks my Divine Being when you humans pray to me. It’s just one demand after another.…
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Posted inGod Reality Religions

Why bad tsunamis happen to good people

“Why?” is a many-faceted word when it comes to disasters. Science can tell us the physical reasons why the tsunami hit South and Southeast Asia, but people in the area (and elsewhere) also want answers to broader questions: Why us? Why here? Why now? These are queries in an article by Kenneth Wordward in the January 10 issue of Newsweek: “Countless Souls Cry Out to God.” The article describes how survivors of four faiths, Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, and Christianity, are variously conceiving the metaphysical meaning of the tsunami cataclysm. The Hindu inhabitants of poor fishing communities don’t have sophisticated theological…
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Posted inGod Science Universe

Scale of the universe

We are small. Very, very small. The universe is large. Very, very large. Most people have no idea how insignificant we, Earth, and even the Sun are in relation to the universe. Even smart scientific people. Once I gave a talk to a group of medical students at the Oregon Health & Science University. Instead of telling a joke to warm up the audience, I asked them, “Does anyone have an idea how many stars there are in our Milky Way galaxy?” No one knows the answer for sure, but I figured that I’d get some reasonable guesses. Yet I…
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Posted inBooks Christianity/Jesus Mystics

The Cloud of Unknowing: Devotion

“The Cloud of Unknowing,” written in the fourteenth century by an anonymous English Christian, is the fourth of my Five Books to Support the Churchless that I’ve been writing about. I’m trying to sum up the essence of each book in a single word. For “The Cloud of Unknowing” it is devotion. But this is a devotion utterly unlike that practiced by most Christians, and also unlike that practiced by almost everyone of any faith. For the author, whom I’ll call Anonymous, espouses an apophatic spirituality. As this web site explains, “apophasis” is a Greek word that means “without images.”…
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Posted inGod Radha Soami Satsang Beas Religions

Start worrying about your religion if…

After reading my last post, a friend enquired about whether any lightning strikes have been observed heading for my increasingly faithless soul. He was joking. But the vision of bolts from heaven being thrown at the unfaithful got me thinking: Isn’t it strange that, jokingly or not, we can entertain the idea that a God who supposedly is so much better than us also can be imagined as so much worse? I make no claims about possessing any divine qualities. But if you disagree with me, almost certainly I won’t get mad at you. Peeved maybe, but not mad. So…
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Posted inChristianity/Jesus Radha Soami Satsang Beas Science

Why I’m not a Christian

A few days ago I got an email from a thoughtful and well-spoken Christian, Steve, who had come across the Church of the Churchless. He disagreed with what I said in my “Brother of Jesus ossuary hoax” posting: “Christianity, if it is true, should be independent of Jesus Christ.” I enjoyed reading Steve’s thoughts, and hope he won’t mind my sharing them. Download Message from a Christian.doc (28.0K)

Steve, I admire your commitment to Christianity. I also like the attitude reflected in your comment, “I say this not in an effort to convert you….” Amen to that, and I hope you take this response of mine in the same spirit, for I’m not out to convert you to my unfaith either. I simply enjoy our interplay of ideas. Your email message stimulated some reflections of my own that encompass the theme of this post, “Why I’m not a Christian,” but also go beyond them.

For not only am I not a Christian, increasingly I find myself not anything else either. I don’t know what I am. For thirty-five years I’ve called myself a “satsangi,” a generic Indian term that means a member of a sangat, or congregation if you like. Interestingly, the spiritual organization that I’ve been a part of—Radha Soami Satsang Beas, or RSSB—in some ways is more Christian than any denomination that believes in the divinity of Jesus.

Why do I say this? Because the centerpiece of RSSB, along with related groups that fall under the rubric of “Sant Mat” (path of the saints), is a living master who is considered to be, like Christ, a Son of God. The master, or guru, is regarded as God in living form (or GILF, as some discussion groups abbreviate him). Many Sant Mat disciples come from a Christian background. Frequently they find that their relationship with the master and his teachings offers them everything that Christianity did, and then some.

I used to have no doubts about Radha Soami Satsang Beas or my own master, Charan Singh. Now I do. I consider this to be spiritual progress, not backsliding. I used to accept many things on faith that now I put in a “maybe, but remains to be proven” category. This is a big category in my mind. I’ve got countless concepts about God and spirituality filed away from a lifetime of reading, meditating, and general life-experiencing.

What I am sure of would fit on a few post-it notes; what remains a hypothesis fills shelf upon shelf in the library of my mind.

Once I realized this, I could no longer say with my previous ease, “I’m a ________.” That blank has had numerous entries during my fifty-six years: Catholic, hippie pothead, existentialist humanist, satsangi, and now—nothing. Well, “nothing” in the sense of a tidy moniker that I can assign to the form of my spiritual aspirations.

If I had to give a one-word answer to the question, “What do you believe in?” it would be “reality.” This certainly isn’t nothing, but since it is nothing in particular and everything in all I feel that Churchlessness is the straightest path to ultimate truth.

Steve, you said that “Truth—with a capital ‘T’—is outside its [science’s] realm and science is not qualified to posit nor hypothesize in the spiritual or philosophical realm.” Well, then, what is Truth inside if it is outside of science? In other words, where does Truth with a capital ‘T’ reside?

This is the big question. Really, it is the only question. All other queries can be reduced to this Mother of All Questions. My Christian correspondent said that “Scripture is meant to reveal specifics of God; his nature, desires, guidelines and plans.” So does Truth reside in a book? I can’t believe this. How did it come to be in a book? That place, the source, is what I want to find.

Steve’s message ended with: “I don’t see Christianity being on shaky ground at all. However, if you remove Christ from Christianity, you no longer have Christianity.” Yes, we agree on at least the last sentence. However, I consider that a faith which stands or falls on the nature of a single person, dead or alive, is on shaky ground. Others who number in the billions, disagree. And that’s fine by me.

I just cannot accept that the keys to the mysteries of the cosmos are held by a particular man or woman, and no one can pass through the doorway of Truth without following in that person’s footsteps. Could Truth play favorites in this fashion? Can only a chosen few become citizens of Ultimate Reality, with the rest of us destined to remain aliens in this strange material world?

Science seeks the universal, not the particular, for the rock bottom of reality seemingly must be something (energy? consciousness? spirit?) capable of supporting everything. Thus the way of science in knowing physical existence also is the way of knowing spiritual existence. Such is my hypothesis, at least, and it rests comfortably with me.

Along these lines, the New York Times web site had an interesting article today called “God (or Not), Physics and, of Course, Love: Scientists Take a Leap.” The question “What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?” was posed to scientists, futurists, and other creative thinkers. Their answers are fascinating. I’ll include the entire article in a post continuation. Here’s how one person, David Meyers, answered the question in a fashion that I wholeheartedly agree with:

As a Christian monotheist, I start with two unproven axioms: 1. There is a God. 2. It’s not me (and it’s also not you). Together, these axioms imply my surest conviction: that some of my beliefs (and yours) contain error. We are, from dust to dust, finite and fallible. We have dignity but not deity.

And that is why I further believe that we should a) hold all our unproven beliefs with a certain tentativeness (except for this one!), b) assess others’ ideas with open-minded skepticism, and c) freely pursue truth aided by observation and experiment.

This mix of faith-based humility and skepticism helped fuel the beginnings of modern science, and it has informed my own research and science writing. The whole truth cannot be found merely by searching our own minds, for there is not enough there. So we also put our ideas to the test. If they survive, so much the better for them; if not, so much the worse.

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Posted inChristianity/Jesus Religions

Brother of Jesus ossuary hoax

Poof! There goes one of the few pieces of evidence that Jesus actually existed, a two thousand year-old box inscribed with “James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus.” A few days ago Israel indicted four antiquities collectors for forging artifacts, among them this ossuary that supposedly contained the bones of Jesus’ brother.

What intrigues me most about this story is what it says about Christianity. The discovery of this box a few years ago was big news. Not so much for its archaeological significance, as a “60 Minutes” piece about the ossuary that we saw recently said that these burial boxes are commonplace. Rows of them were shown stacked in some museum storage area.

Rather, interest in the “James, brother of Jesus” ossuary was extreme because it would have been the earliest evidence outside of the Bible of Jesus’ existence. Christianity is nothing without Jesus, so if the ossuary were real, this would have offered indirect proof of the reality of the religion whose core is Christ. But the inscription on the box wasn’t real. So Christianity remains resting on a shaky foundation of gospel accounts whose veracity never can be proven.

Is this any way to run a religion? The Western religions—Christianity, Islam, Judaism—are dependent on revelations. If people—Jesus, Muhammad, Moses—hadn’t revealed the nature of God to the faithful there wouldn’t be any substance to those faiths. So the historical existence of these founders is central to the theology of each religion. Imagine Christianity without Jesus, Islam without Muhammad, Judaism without Moses. Would you still have a vital religion?

On the other hand, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Taoism are pleasingly complete without the presence of any particular human revelation. Though bearing the name of the Buddha, even Buddhism can stand comfortably on its own without leaning on the person once known as Siddhartha Gautama. Buddhists say, “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him?” Can Christians say the same about Jesus?

A religion should be able to provide universal answers to universal questions. What is the nature of God or ultimate reality? How can this highest truth be known? What is the relation of human beings, us, to existence as a whole, the cosmos? If answers to such queries can only come through the unique experience of particular people, then they aren’t real answers.

Science is much wiser in this regard. Physicists don’t worship Einstein because he revealed the theory of relativity. The laws of nature are independent of anyone’s knowledge about them. If Einstein hadn’t discovered the relativistic nature of space and time, someone else would have.

Similarly, a true spiritual science doesn’t focus on the “professor” who teaches about divine truth. This prophet, master, guru, saint, guide—whatever you want to call him or her—is separate from the truth being taught. Reality exists whether or not someone is speaking or writing about it.

Christianity, if it is true, should be independent of Jesus Christ. That statement will sound strange to most Christians, which indicates how shaky is the foundation of Christianity. If the rock-bottom truth of the cosmos is considered to depend on whether a particular person really lived and died two thousand years ago, then we haven’t gotten down to the heart of reality.

Here’s an article from the New York Times about the hoax:

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Posted inBooks Mystics Spiritual practice/meditation

Ramana: Simplicity

Ockham’s razor is a rule in science and philosophy that the simplest explanation is the best. Extending this principle to religion and spirituality, Ramana, a twentieth-century Indian mystic, shines.

Only recently did I began reading Ramana seriously. I wish I had done so earlier. I’d always thought that the Vedanta teachings which form the core of Ramana’s message were intellectual and complex. They can be, if a complex intellectual tries to communicate Vedanta.

But when the teachings are described by Ramana in the lively question and answer format of “Talks with Ramana Maharshi,” the highest form of Vedanta is revealed as marvelously simple and practical. This is Advaita, literally “not two.”

What could be simpler than one?

Advaita finds unity at the core of the cosmos. So does science. Or, at least this is what science expects to find. The quest of physicists is for the theory of everything that is the root explanation of the universe, not for the theories of everything.

Ramana’s teachings thus have an appealing scientific flavor. This is in contrast to most other spiritual paths and every religion, which expect you to believe in things that defy rational explanation or direct experience. Why? Because any faith founded on dualism necessarily posits a gap between the believer and what is believed.

If I believe in God, there obviously are two entities involved here: “I” and “God.” Given this situation, confirming my belief gets complex. Somehow I have to narrow the divide between me and divinity so what now is just a subjective idea or emotion for me becomes an undeniable objective fact.

So spiritual systems generally proscribe dogmas and theologies that amount to marching orders. Do this, don’t do that; follow this course, not that one. If the believer follows directions and treads the spiritual path in the correct manner, then the promise is that he or she someday will arrive at God’s doorstep (taking “God” to mean ultimate reality, not necessarily a personal being).

The more steps you’re asked to take, the more potential missteps there are. This is why I’m much attracted to Ramana’s simplicity. He says that all of Vedanta can be summed up in two Biblical passages: “I am who I am” (Exodus 3:14) and “Be still, and know that I am God!” (Psalms 46:10).

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Posted inBooks Christianity/Jesus Mystics

Eckhart: Detachment

Today the birth of God’s son is celebrated. Most people think this child of the Father is Jesus. Meister Eckhart, the medieval Catholic mystic theologian, suggests another possibility: it is each of us.

I find this idea much more palatable and convincing than the traditional notion that Jesus somehow was born miraculously by a virgin woman so that he could die for our sins. Eckhart considers that “virgin” really means “someone who is free of all alien images, as free in fact as that person was before he or she existed.”

This conception points us toward a state of consciousness that everyone can achieve, not just Jesus. There are many problems with modern Christianity. One of the worst is its emphasis on stories of the past rather than transformations of the present.

As we note frequently here at the Church of the Churchless, most Christians feel that if they merely believe in the divinity of Christ, that’s enough: believe and you’re saved. The exact mechanism by which salvation takes place is a mystery. How could the death on a cross of someone over two thousand years ago alter the course of someone’s life (and afterlife) now? What connection is there between the soul of Jesus and the soul of you or me?

Eckhart asks “Where is he who is born King of the Jews?” He answers, “This birth takes place in the soul just as it takes place in eternity, no more and no less. For there is only one birth, and this takes place in the essence and ground of the soul.”

So the virgin birth of God’s son didn’t only happen to Mary in the manger. This is just a metaphor and not to be taken as a historical fact. A recent article in Newsweek, “The Birth of Jesus,” points out that the four gospels don’t tell a common story about Jesus’ birth. How could they? There is no real evidence that Jesus ever spoke of how and where he was born, and neither Mary nor Joseph is cited as a direct source. A court of law would say that the whole Christmas story is hearsay and not to be trusted.

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Posted inPersonal/Stories

A Christmas memory of my mother

My mother died in April, 1985. Around Christmas that year I shared some feelings about her with friends and family. I tucked that message away in a Bible that I had given her on her birthday shortly before she died. I’ve only looked at what I wrote a few times in the past twenty-odd years. Something made me pull it out just now. The book I quote at the end is Sir Edwin Arnold’s translation of the “Bhagavad Gita,” a favorite of mine. And of hers. This is a Hindu holy book, but it conveys a universal Christmas message: the…
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Posted inReality Religions Science

Reality is the best religion

Is religion isn’t real, what good is it? Not much. Admittedly, believing in something that isn’t real can make you feel better and offer consolation when life is tough. It is easier to accept a tragedy if this is taken to be “God’s will.” And instead of feeling powerless to change an unfortunate situation, many people embrace prayer as a way to call a higher power into action. Similarly, children ask Santa Claus to bring them presents from the North Pole. They also put newly lost baby teeth under their pillows and expect that the Tooth Fairy will reward them.…
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Posted inBooks God Mystics

Vivekananda: Strength

In my “Five Books to Support the Churchless” post, I said I’d share what I like most about the teachings of Vivekananda, Ramana, Eckhart, Plotinus, and the anonymous author of “The Cloud of Unknowing.” Each points toward the same spiritual goal, unity with the ultimate reality of God. Yet I find that each emphasizes a different quality needed to become one with the One.

For Vivekananda the quality is strength. In his presentation of the ancient, yet still new, Vedanta philosophy he continually urges us to realize that there is nothing to fear. Only in duality can fear exist. I am only afraid of things that are not me, whether they be immaterial or physical. An attacker who tries to steal my wallet isn’t me. A cancer that upsets my body’s health isn’t me. An obsessive thought that won’t leave my mind isn’t me.

Or so I believe. Maybe, says Vivekananda, all these things really are me. For if the cosmos truly is one, not many, then there is no “other” to fear. This is the highest teaching of Vedanta, unqualified monism.

A dualistic religious perspective that sees God as separate both from nature and the human soul has to grapple with the problem of evil. “How,” Vivekananda asks, “is it possible that under the rule of a just and merciful God, the repository of an infinite number of good qualities, there can be so many evils in this word?”

The Hindus, he answers, never put the blame on God or on a separate Satan. Instead, they hold the eminently scientific view that effects spring from causes in a never-ending chain. Vivekananda says, “Therefore no other person is needed to shape the destiny of mankind but man himself….’We reap what we sow.’”

So here is one source of strength, the fact that each of us creates our own destiny. If we don’t like the circumstances in which we find ourselves, we can do something about it. Fresh causes will led to fresh effects. It isn’t necessary to passively wait for God to save us from our suffering, for our own actions have created both our joys and our despairs. What we have created, we can change.

But Vedanta goes farther than this dualistic idea that the entity known as “me” can cause effects in “not-me” that will then alter my condition (for example, if I am nice to people they will be nicer to me, thereby making me happier).

Vivekananda says, “The real Vedanta philosophy begins with those known as qualified non-dualists. They make the statement that the effect is never different from the cause; the effect is but the cause reproduced in another form. If the universe is the effect and God the cause, it must be God Himself; it cannot be anything but that.”

This means that the universe is the body of God, just as the flesh and bones writing or reading these words is the body of me or you. As the soul is considered to be immanent in the human body, so is God immanent in the body of the entire universe. Bodies come and go, whether they be individual forms or entire universes (the Big Bang may culminate in a Big Crunch), while souls and God remain unchanged forever.

So this qualified non-dualist philosophy encourages even greater strength in you and me. At heart we are not weak, isolated, limited beings who are born, live for a brief spell, and then die. We have the capacity to realize our oneness with the All—God. Vivekananda says, “There is not a particle, not an atom in the universe, where He is not. Again, souls are all limited; they are not omnipresent. When their powers become expanded and they become perfect, there is no more birth and death for them; they live with God for ever.”

Yet Vedanta urges that even this exalted conception of the soul be expanded. This is non-dualistic Vedanta or Advaita, “not two.” Namely, one. According to Vivekananda this is where human thought finds its highest expression. “It is too abstruse, too elevated,” he says, “to be the religion of the masses…It is difficult for even the most intelligent man or woman in any country to understand Advaita—we have made ourselves so weak; we have made ourselves so low.”

According to Advaita the truth is that there aren’t many souls in the universe. There is only a single soul: the Self. From one perspective this is God, Brahman. From another perspective it is an individual soul, Atman. Regardless, there is no difference between God and the soul, Brahman and Atman. All is One.

Vivekananda says, “The whole of this universe is one Unity, one Existence—physically, mentally, morally, and spiritually. We are looking upon this one Existence in different ways and creating all these images upon it.”

Who then should we worship? A God far off in the heavens? No. A savior sent by God to redeem us? No. A natural world separate from ourselves? No. A book, icon, holy relic, place of pilgrimage, or other sacred object? No. Advaita Vedanta teaches that the only entity worthy of our worship is wonderfully close at hand:

Our own Self.

I’ll let Vivekanada explain this bold assertion in his own words. As you read them, feel the strength within you. I love how he reminds us that we have been beaten down for so long by religions that weaken us, we have lost touch with the power of the soul that is our birthright. And also our deathright. That power can’t be taken away from us, even though most of us have voluntarily surrendered it.

Take it back. Become spiritually independent. Let the energy of the cosmos flow through you, for it is you.

[All of the excerpts in this post are from “The Atman,” a talk delivered by Vivekananda in Brooklyn, February 2, 1896]

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Posted inFundamentalism Radha Soami Satsang Beas Religions

Religion should unite, not divide

Laurel, my wife, was moved to write a meaningful short essay yesterday: “Religion Should Unite, Not Divide.” Like me, she’s been disturbed by all the fundamentalist-inspired divisiveness evident of late. Well, also evident of early, for as long as there has been religion, there has been religious intolerance and inhumanity.

We both believe that the only way to be spiritual is to be non-religious. Religion is mostly about belief; spirituality is mostly about experience. A disturbingly large percentage of purportedly religious people don’t practice what they preach. They claim to aspire to unconditional love, then vote to discriminate against homosexuals. They claim to renounce unjustified killing, then proudly support the slaughter of innocent people in Iraq.

Laurel says in her piece that if the unity of God truly is the goal to which religious believers aspire, then churches and other places of worship should be an earthly reflection of this oneness: “If this were the role of religion, the only valid religious teachings would be those which teach love, acceptance, and unity with all people.”

Well said. As much as I like the meetings of the spiritual group I attend most Sunday mornings, I cringe inwardly every time I hear a speaker say, “We are so fortunate to be among the chosen few who have been blessed to return to God.” Laurel, entirely appropriately, frequently teases me about this divisive attitude.

Putting on her best Saturday Night Live “Church Lady” voice, she will say to me: “You’re saved, but Satan has doomed me to hell!” “Yes, you’re right,” I’ll reply with tongue firmly in my cheek, “But I’ll try to put in a good word for you when I see God.”

We joke about how almost every religious or spiritual group, including Radha Soami Satsang Beas (Science of the Soul), which I’ve been a longtime member of, considers that its followers, and they alone, are the “chosen people.” If you add up all the supposedly chosen people in the world—Christians, Jews, Muslims, and members of other exclusive sects—the unchosen such as Laurel are in the minority. (I recently wrote about this “all believers are above average” strangeness in “You’re religious, but are you right?”

Here is Laurel’s essay, which she has submitted to our local Salem Monthly alternative publication. As she says at the end of the piece, we’re thinking about forming a Church of the Churchless group here in Salem which would meet in physical reality instead of the blogosphere. If you’re interested in being part of such a group, send us an email.

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Posted inPersonal/Stories Radha Soami Satsang Beas

What’s in a name?

Jesus. Buddha. Mohammed. Moses. Sankara. It’s interesting that each of these great sages of Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, Judaism, and Hinduism is known by one name. Ditto with God, Allah, Brahman. In spirituality, simple names seem to go with profound people and ultimate concepts. This came to mind after I got an email message from a Indian man in England with whom I had previously corresponded. He apparently had read my “God’s here, but I’ve got to go” post where I reminisced about having to pee really bad while sitting in the midst of tens of thousand of devotees attending a…
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Posted inBooks Mystics

Five books to support the churchless

Come December all kinds of “Best Whatever” lists pop up. Best Movies, Best Albums, Best TV Shows, and many more. Maybe that’s why I feel the spirit to list my favorite five books to support the churchless, those who are spiritual but don’t belong to an organized religion that has its own pre-selected holy writings. These are books that I read and then re-read. These are books that I could read a thousand times and still feel like I am reading them for the first time. Why? Because I’ll never plumb the depths of their mystical-spiritual messages. Or perhaps I…
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Posted inMiracles

O Miracles, where art thou?

For many people this time of year is a time to celebrate miracles. For Christians, Jesus’ virgin birth and resurrection. For Jews, a one day supply of temple lamp oil that burns for eight days. Christians seem to have the edge in the miracle department—birth and death being more dramatic than a burning lamp—but I never fail to wonder, “Where have all the miracles gone?” Never, ever, not even once, has there been a thoroughly documented miracle worthy of a National Academy of Sciences stamp of approval. Most miracles worthy of their name are reputed to have occurred hundreds of…
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