Posted inOpen Threads

Open Thread 45 (free speech for comments)

Here's a new Open Thread. Remember, off-topic comments should go in an Open Thread.  If you don't see a recent comment, or comments, posted, it might be because you've failed to follow the above rule. Keep to the subject of a blog post if you leave a comment on it. And if you want to use this blog as a "chat room," do that in an open thread. As noted before, it's good to have comments in a regular blog post related to its subject, and it's also good to have a place where almost anything goes in regard to sharing ideas, feelings, experiences, and such.…
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Posted inAtheism God

Why asking for proof that God doesn’t exist makes no sense

Today I watched a recorded episode of Bill Maher's Real Time HBO show. Scott Galloway, one of Maher's guests, was really down on TikTok, the video sharing service owned by a Chinese company, ByteDance. Galloway thought TikTok should be banned in the United States because he believes the Chinese Communist Party is using it to undermine the patriotism of American young people.  But he couldn't provide any evidence that this is happening. Galloway just believed that the Chinese government was messing with the minds of our youth. At one point he said that it wasn't up to those opposed to…
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Posted inDelusions

Discard religious and mystical fantasies. Just live life as it is.

I've come to feel that the strangest thing about religion and mysticism is how these dogmas introduce a big dose of strangeness into life that makes living way more complicated than it needs to be. Here's another way of saying this: everybody's life is full of problems and challenges. But life itself isn't a problem or challenge. It's just life.  So when a religion or mystical path tells you that you need to be saved, or enlightened, or self-realized, or god-realized, or cleansed of sin, or any other bit of bullshit that holier-than-thou preachers, gurus, and such like to blab…
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Posted inMystics Reality Religions

Religion and mysticism are mostly conceptual

Reality can't be captured in concepts. After all, it's extremely unlikely that the human brain has evolved to be able to completely capture the nature of the reality that fashioned both the human brain and everything else in existence. But this doesn't take away the utility of concepts for making sense of the world. "Tree" is a useful way of describing the general nature of vegetative entities that vary tremendously in size, appearance, and such, yet share common characteristics. However, trees are part of the natural world. They are obviously real.  Concepts that refer to entities which can't be observed…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas Spiritual practice/meditation

Spirit isn’t supernatural. It’s physical.

Looking back, one of the strangest things about the India-based religious group I belonged to for 35 years, Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), is how the RSSB teachings taught that the mind wasn't to be trusted, supposedly being an agent of Kal, the negative power that rules the lower regions of creation. Yet like all other religions, RSSB was thoroughly in the grip of mental concepts that had no foundation in any sort of discernible reality.  Of course, I didn't realize that at the time, since I was in the grip of a mental concept called "blind faith" that led…
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Posted inFundamentalism Religions

A quote that shows the arrogance of religious zealots

If there's one thing that religious zealots aren't, it's humble. Well, actually there's many other things that they aren't also. Like, in touch with reality; thoughtful; reasonable; open-minded; respectful of truth. But a lack of humility stood out in a quote I came across in an article in the February 27 issue of The New Yorker, Minister of Chaos: Itamar Ben-Gvir and the politics of reaction. It's about one of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu's cabinet members. Ben-Gvir is a right-wing extremist who was named the national security minister. The quote came from Dov Morell. Morell used to embrace the views…
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Posted inAwareness Mindfulness

Mindfulness and cognitive behavioral therapy

I got a Master's Degree in Social Work way back in 1973 that exposed me to the fundamentals of counseling before I headed off in the direction of health services research and planning. Then I married my second wife, Laurel, in 1990. She also had a MSW, but unlike me, pursued a career in social work, ending up after our marriage by starting a private psychotherapy practice. Laurel would talk about how cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) was used in her practice, since it is fairly short-term and insurance companies don't like paying for lengthy psychotherapy aimed at delving into the…
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Posted inMiscellaneous

Deep thoughts (sort of) about Oscars 95

Last night my wife and I engaged in our annual ritual of watching every bit of the Oscars show where Academy Awards are presented to film winners in 43 categories, if I recall that number correctly. We like movies. So we like the Oscars. This year, per usual, the show ran long, so I spent 3 1/2 hours of my remaining life span in front of our TV. Given that expenditure of vital energy, I'm going to do my best to conjure a Church of the Churchless blog post out of the more philosophical/political aspects of the Oscars. A primary…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas Religions

“Truth-Default Theory” helps explain why religions get away with falsehoods

Last Sunday a friend gave me his unread copy of Malcolm Gladwell's 2019 book, Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don't Know. I hadn't heard of the book before. It seems to be less well known than Gladwell's other books like Blink and The Tipping Point. I'm enjoying it after reading the first few chapters. This morning I read "The Queen of Cuba." A primary focus of the chapter is on how Ana Belen Montes, a Cuban expert at the Defense Intelligence Agency, got away with being a double agent for Cuba even though warning…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas

Here’s what I said to someone with doubts about Radha Soami Satsang Beas

Recently I got an email from someone who is an initiate of Gurinder Singh Dhillon, the guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), a religious organization based in India that has centers around the world. This person said that they've been having doubts about RSSB and don't feel connected to the RSSB guru.  Not being able to express their doubts with other initiates, I was asked to provide some feedback to what the person had to say. Below is my response. My mention of Sufism relates to the person saying that they had a Sufi background. Nice to hear from…
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Posted inConsciousness Personal/Stories

Anesthesia with propofol raises interesting consciousness questions

Because I'm prone to getting non-cancerous polyps, which could turn into cancer if not removed, I've had colonoscopies every five years or so since I was around fifty. The most recent ones have involved anesthesia with propofol, a frequently-used drug with few side effects but potential for abuse. Because it induces euphoria in many people. One study found about half.  In 2011 I wrote "Finding enlightenment through a colonoscopy (and propofol)." After talking about a disturbing conversation I had with a nurse about whether propofol truly prevents a patient from feeling discomfort/pain, or merely takes away the memory of discomfort/pain,…
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Posted inPolitics

Religious bigotry behind hatred of transgender people

There are lots of reasons why I reject religion. One big one is that religious people, especially fundamentalists, often are extremely narrow-minded and judgmental when it comes to sexual matters. Here in the United States, opposition to transgender individuals is a disgusting hallmark of the Republican Party -- which includes evangelicals and other religious zealots who love to hate those who don't conform to their theological beliefs about gender. It's a plain fact that some people with a male or female body don't view themselves as being the sex they were assigned at birth. A CNN story, "GOP lawmakers escalate…
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Posted inMindfulness Spiritual practice/meditation

If our attention wanders, the question is where it should rest

Most of us are afflicted more often than we'd like with what often is called "monkey mind." Meaning, our attention is prone to flitting around from this to that to whatever, sort of like monkeys swinging from branch to branch in a seemingly aimless fashion. But why is monkey mind a bad thing? Monkeys seem to have a good time in trees. Why are we humans so concerned about controlling our attention? That's one of the themes in an article by Casey Cep in the January 30, 2023 issue of The New Yorker, Eat, Pray, Concentrate. The online version is…
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Posted inAtheism Buddhism Personal/Stories

I might have had a mini-enlightenment last night

Even though I no longer believe in God, I'm attracted to non-religious Buddhism. So even though I don't engage in any sort of formal Buddhist practice, I like the idea of being enlightened.  Just seems better than being endarkened.  Though I can't say with any certainty that the intuitive flash that coursed through my consciousness as I was heading to bed last night was a sign of a mini-enlightenment (I'm way too humble to claim a maxi-enlightenment), I like the idea that it was. So I'll go with that. I was heading down the stairs that lead to the bedroom…
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Posted inReality

We are the only animal that can deny our animal nature

In some regards we humans have capabilities beyond those of other species with whom we share our planet. But in this regard we are inferior to those creatures: we are the only animal that can deny our animal nature. Not everybody does this, of course. I'm proudly animal, as is Maxim Loskutoff, who wrote "The Beast in Me" in The New York Times collection of philosophical essays published in the newspaper, Question Everything. As you can read below, Loskutoff vividly recognized his animalness when a grizzly bear stalked him and his partner during their hike in Glacier National Park. But…
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Posted inComments Mystics

Mystical experiences need testing if they become a worldview

As I've noted before, and surely will do so again, one of the pleasures I get from this blog is reading intelligent comment conversations on posts that I've written. Or in this case, on an Open Thread where the comments are the substance of the post.  Below is a comment that Appreciative Reader left on an Open Thread in response to a comment by manjit. If you want to read manjit's comment, click on that link and scroll up to the preceding comment. Appreciative Reader has a knack for saying things in a way that I've never come across before.…
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Posted inBooks India

Purity vs. pollution is a bizarre aspect of caste

Since I'm reading, and enjoying, Isabel Wilkerson's great book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, I was especially interested to read a recent newspaper story about Seattle becoming the first city in the United States to ban caste discrimination. Caste, in Wilkerson's view, is at the heart of American racism, Nazi Germany's horrors against Jews, and naturally India's longstanding caste divisions. I noted in a previous post how Wilkerson discovered that even currently among Indian scholars studying caste, she was able to tell who was upper caste and who was lower caste by the way they carried themselves and how…
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Posted inMindfulness

Mindfulness helps bring body and mind into the same place

Inspiration can be found anywhere. When I started to read the current issue of TIME magazine, I was pleasantly surprised to turn a page and find "5 ways to be mindful without meditating." (The online version of the story has 8 ways.) I liked what Angela Haupt had to say about how our body can be in one place while our mind is in a far distant place -- often not just geographically, but also in time, since almost everybody is prone to thoughts of the past and future even as our body is firmly in the present. After reading…
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Posted inBuddhism Vedanta/Advaita

Why I prefer Buddhism to Advaita Vedanta

On Sam Harris' Waking Up app, I noticed there was a lengthy (1 hr 37 m) discussion between Harris and Swami Sarvapriyananda, a Hindu monk and Minister of the Vedanta Society of New York. So for the past few days I'd listen to 10-15 minutes or so of the discussion every morning. Today I finished listening to the whole exchange as I was driving around in my car. It was really interesting. Both Harris and Sarvapriyananda are highly knowledgeable about both Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta. Of course, Harris embraces Buddhism and Sarvapriyananda Vedanta, so each of them is more expert…
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Posted inAlan Watts Books

The profundity of “There are no black people in Africa”

As Alan Watts was fond of saying, echoing a basic tenet of Taoism, you can't have good without bad, virtue without vice, up without down -- or indeed any quality without its opposite.  Everything becomes what it is in relation to something that it isn't.  If everybody in the world had always believed in God, there would be no religious people. There would just be people. Ditto if everybody had always lived without any conception of God. Then there would be no atheists, just people. Before sentient creatures who can conceive of abstractions arrived on our planet, the natural world…
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