Posted inFundamentalism God

Delusion of imagining you’re an instrument of the divine will

Here's a right-on illustration by L.K. Hanson. I saw this on a Facebook post yesterday. The person who shared it said that Hanson's work appears in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. When people talk about being a special instrument of the divine will, I'm reminded of Garrison Keillor's description of his fictional Minnesota small town, Lake Wobegon, “where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.” In the world of fundamentalist religion, all the believers are especially attuned to God's will. Which can't be, given how different religions typically are from each other.…
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Posted inBooks Buddhism

Awareness doesn’t require a subject who is aware

A few days ago I wrote about how there's no need to find your self, because you don't have one. That's the central message of Jay Garfield's book, "Losing Ourselves: Learning to Live Without a Self." Sounds good to me. One of my favorite humorous pieces from The Onion is Search For Self Called Off After 38 Years. Here's how it starts off. CHICAGO—The longtime search for self conducted by area man Andrew Speth was called off this week, the 38-year-old said Monday. "I always thought that if I kept searching and exploring, I'd discover who I truly was," said…
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Posted inBooks Buddhism Taoism/Tai Chi

Relax: no need to find your self, because you don’t have one

I've become a fan of easygoing approaches to spirituality. That's one reason I enjoy Taoism so much. The Taoists I've known don't look upon life very seriously. Neither do many Buddhists. A common denominator of Taoism and Buddhism is that neither philosophy assumes that we have a self or soul. Meaning, they're selfless.  This takes the pressure off of goals such as self-realization, self-awareness, knowing one's self, and so on. Those sorts of practices still can be pursued, but with the understanding that there's no such thing as an unchanging self or soul lurking within us. Just substitute "person" for…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories Radha Soami Satsang Beas Spiritual practice/meditation

I respond to a B.S. comment about my 52 years of meditation

UPDATE: Spence Tepper has apologized to me for his ridiculous attempt to claim that my 35 years of daily meditation while a member of Radha Soami Satsang Beas, usually for several hours a day, amounted to "nothing." Good for Spence. He recognized how wrong he was. Hopefully from now on he will realize that my approach to meditation is the wise one: don't challenge someone's personal experience in meditation, but DO challenge any claim that this experience proves the existence of a supernatural realm beyond the physical. Spence doesn't like my skepticism toward his brand of religious fundamentalism. I've pointed out…
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Posted inBooks Science

Science delivers accurate predictions. Religion doesn’t.

Yay, me! I finally finished reading Johnjoe McFadden's book, "Life is Simple: How Occam's Razor Set Science Free and Shapes the Universe."  It took me longer than expected, because I didn't find McFadden's lengthy descriptions of the life and times of historical figures in science, starting with the ancient Greeks, to be all that interesting. I guess he felt he needed to do that in order to buttress his case for how science came to embrace the adage of William of Occam: "Entities should not be multiplied without necessity." This doesn't mean that the world is simple, just that in…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas

Cognitive dissonance is alive and well in commenters on this blog

It's amusing to observe how much work some religious believers who comment on my blog posts go to in defending an obvious fact.  A recent example is me stating in several blog posts that the notion of the Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) guru being God in Human Form, or GIHF, is a central RSSB tenet. How can you have a "Path of the Saints" without a saint? The whole rationale behind the RSSB teachings is that God manifests in the form of a Perfect Living Master (PLM) to guide souls back to Him, because otherwise God remains an unseen,…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas

RSSB teachings: “The perfect Master is the Lord in human flesh”

Recently I wrote two blog posts about the notion of a guru being God in Human Form. First, I said that this makes no sense. Then I said that Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) does teach that the RSSB guru is God in Human Form.  Since some regular commenters on this blog are familiar with the RSSB teachings, I was surprised with the pushback that second post got. Even though I'd provided quotes from two previous RSSB gurus saying that, indeed, the RSSB guru is God in Human Form, for some reason this obvious fact was being denied by a…
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Posted inFundamentalism

Finale of “Under the Banner of Heaven” shows absurdity of religion

Back in May I wrote about a streaming series on Hulu, "Under the Banner of Heaven." In the title of that post I called it a compelling story of religion gone bad.  The series is based on a true story, the murder of a young woman and her baby at the hands of extremely fundamentalist Mormons. Last night my wife and I watched the final episode. It tied things together nicely, and was the most philosophical of any episode in how the characters talked about atheism and religious belief. Detective Jeb Pyre, a devout Mormon white guy, has a Native…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas

Sometimes the RSSB guru sounds like he doesn’t believe the RSSB teachings

Sort of weirdly, in a recent post, "RSSB does teach that the guru is God in Human Form," atheist me was arguing that the teachings of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), my spiritual home for 35 years, say that the RSBB guru is God's right hand man (no female gurus yet) while some current members of RSSB were arguing the opposite -- that the guru is just a regular human like everybody else. This perplexed me for a while.  Then I came up with a theory. Being an ancient 73 years old, I was initiated into RSSB way back in…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas

The mystery of Julian Johnson’s death at the Dera in 1939

Recently I heard from someone who asked if I had read a book about the death of Dr. Julian Johnson. Johnson wrote "The Path of the Masters," a book about the philosophy of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), an India-based spiritual organization headed up by a guru. I told the person that I wasn't familiar with the book about Johnson's death and asked if the person could summarize it. With their permission, here's what I received. I did some minor editing and added a few links. Dear Brian, The extremely short version is that the Dera tried to cover up…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas

RSSB does teach that the guru is God in Human Form

Since I was a member of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), an India-based religious organization, for about 35 years, wrote several books for RSSB, and did a lot of speaking on behalf of RSSB, obviously I'm very familiar with the RSSB teachings. So when I saw this comment appear on a recent post about the idea of a guru being more than human, it struck me as astoundingly wrong. (GIHF refers to God in Human Form.) Clearly Karim Rahmaan knows very little about the RSSB teachings. So I'm pleased to correct him. I can easily do this because because in…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas

The idea of a guru being more than human makes no sense

Sometimes the obvious escapes us because our mind has been distracted with other stuff. This just happened to me. I was idly thinking about what I should write about in tonight's churchless blog post, remembering that my previous post was about how to prove that a guru is a fraud. What suddenly struck me was the simple reason why this is so difficult: believers in a guru typically consider that he or she is qualitatively different from other humans.  Meaning, the guru isn't just someone with some special talents, abilities, and traits. That's true of lots of people. Sports stars.…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas

How is it possible to prove the RSSB guru is a fraud?

A few days ago I got a message from someone who said this in her email regarding Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), the India-based religious organization headed up by a guru that I belonged to for 35 years. I am not a member, my close friend has been a member for 5 years and I started to research it as I wanted to know more. That’s how I found your blog. Some of the things I’ve read are alarming and I found even the information on the RSSB official website disturbing.   My friend is very set on the organisation,…
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Posted inConsciousness

We delude ourselves into believing we’re a conscious “I”

Going through a stack of unread magazines, I came across a Scientific American from September 2018 that was a special issue devoted to the subject "Humans: Why we're unlike any other species on the planet." All of the articles are interesting, but I found Susan Blackmore's Decoding the Puzzle of Human Consciousness: The Hardest Problem to be especially so. Blackmore has an affinity for Zen, which is reflected in the concluding excerpts from her article that I've shared below. I resonate with her leaning toward the illusionist theory of consciousness. Meaning, we certainly do have subjective experience, but our sense…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas

RSSB guru in poor health, cancels satsangs for six months

Today someone left this comment about the guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas, Gurinder Singh Dhillon. (Quite a few people who visit this blog have an interest in him, being either currently associated with RSSB or having done so in the past, as I was for 35 years.) Well, it appears RSSB has finally updated their website. All satsangs in India and abroad have been cancelled, including the dera effective immediately until end of November. The update says GSD has been told to rest for his health. Sounds serious if he's cancelled the next 6 months of satsangs and initiations.…
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Posted inReality Science

Space may be created by the interaction of individual quanta of gravity

If you're at a party, talking to someone, and the conversation is lagging, consider saying the title of this blog post: Space may be created by the interaction of individual quanta of gravity.  One of two things could happen, the first being most likely. Either the person will look at you like you're crazy and make an excuse to leave your company, or they'll reply, "That's so interesting. Tell me more." Having read physicist Carlo Rovelli's book, "Reality is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity," I could talk some more about quantum gravity, but only a little…
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Posted inReligions Science

What grounds religion and mysticism in reality? Nothing

During the 35 years I was a believer in an Eastern religion -- Sant Mat, of the Radha Soami Satsang Beas variety -- I spent a lot of time pondering how it was possible to know whether a description of God, spirit, soul, heaven, or something else supernatural really was true. Meaning, that the description wasn't just a bunch of words strung together in a fashion meant to be convincing, but actually reflected the nature of an aspect of reality that transcended this physical universe. My first book, "God's Whisper, Creation's Thunder," was an examination of how the new physics…
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Posted inScience

Science lacks the blind conviction of the zealot

One of the reasons I absolutely love science and dislike religion is this: scientists the world over see reality in much the same way, while religious believers agree only on the need to believe without evidence, not on what they believe is true about their God fantasies. So I wasn't surprised when, several days after writing "Science has a radical distrust of certainty. Me too," which was based on a book by physicist Carlo Rovelli, an Italian, I came across very similar sentiments about certainty in a book by a British physicist, Jim Al-Khalili, The Joy of Science. Here's passages…
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Posted inReligions Science

Science has a radical distrust of certainty. Me too.

If you're absolutely certain that you know what is true, this is a very good sign that you're wrong. Also, that you are religious rather than scientific. This is one of the compelling insights theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli talks about in the concluding chapter of his book, "Reality is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity." In another post I'll describe why Rovelli views the as-yet-unproven theory of quantum gravity as the best approach to resolving the divide between relativity theory and quantum mechanics. For now, I liked what Rovelli had to say about the approach of science…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories Radha Soami Satsang Beas

God can be an imaginary friend, even if you’re an atheist

Recently I heard from a woman who has distanced herself from the Indian religious organization I was a member of for 35 years, Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB). Her family is still very much into RSSB, so she asked me some questions about how I adjusted after being, like her, initiated by the RSSB guru and then coming to see that the RSSB teachings no longer made sense. Here's one of her questions, along with my response. "Babaji" refers to the current RSSB guru, Gurinder Singh Dhillon. Question for me: I find myself saying when I need help (to myself)…
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