Posted inDelusions

Believe in magic, so long as you don’t really believe in it

I'm an atheist who has two wooden Christian crosses sitting on his bedside table. Those are the crosses someone sent to me in a mysterious package, as I wrote about a few days ago. I've got no problem with religious symbols. Plenty of atheists love to visit beautiful holy places, admire religious art, and listen to religious music. Problems arise when people believe that those symbols possess supernatural power. Sure, I'm open to the possibility that Jesus truly is the Son of God and answers prayers addressed to him.  But I'm also open to the possibility of some other entity…
32
Posted inChristianity/Jesus Personal/Stories

I get a mysterious package. Ideas about it welcomed.

Almost everybody likes a good mystery. I sure do. My fiction book reading is almost entirely in the genre of spy/espionage/counterterrorism novels, which involve a lot of intrigue. So I thought I'd outsource to readers of this blog the contents of a mysterious package that arrived in the mail yesterday. If you have an idea about the meaning of what was sent to me, share it in a comment on this post. Here's the envelope I got.  What caught my attention right away was the address and return address both being my address. My razor-sharp mind concluded, Whoever sent this…
23
Posted inBooks Taoism/Tai Chi

Chinese painting points to the mystery of existence

Looking back, one of the stranger aspects of my childhood -- which included a lot of strange stuff -- was how my mother took me to Chinatown in San Francisco when I was fairly young, maybe 12.  I came home with many inexpensive pieces of Chinese art that I put up in my room. Most were images that still appeal to me today. Misty mountains with a small figure of a person walking along with a pagoda or hut perched on the edge of a cliff. I don't know where that instant attraction came from. Nobody I knew had any…
1
Posted inSpiritual practice/meditation Taoism/Tai Chi

Mental Tai Chi and dissolving the remove

Yesterday I had one of those pleasing experiences where I got the same message from three different sources -- one inside my head, from me, and the other two from outside, a guided meditation and a book I was reading.  First, me. I was idly going to sleep, not thinking about much of anything in particular, when the notion mental Tai Chi popped into my mind.  For seventeen years I've been practicing Tai Chi under the guidance of a skilled instructor who is adept at teaching the martial aspect of Tai Chi, as well as the more typical relaxation/exercise aspect. …
14
Posted inBooks Politics Religions

What the Woke Racism book says about religion

Yesterday I wrote a post for my HinesSight blog, "Woke Racism" is a great book. The subtitle of the book is "How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America." John McWhorter, the author, is an atheist. So when he calls woke racism a religion, that's intended as a negative judgement.  In his chapter, The New Religion, McWhorter describes the ways what he calls The Elect (meaning, those who embrace woke racism) act in a religious fashion.  Here's some excerpts from that chapter. With the rise of Third Wave Antiracism we are witnessing the birth of a new religion, just as…
10
Posted inReality Science

Reason rules with God’s will, karma, and laws of nature

Having written about reason and rationality recently, here's some thoughts that came to mind (weird phrase, since where else would thoughts appear?) as I was musing about how people believe in God's will and karma as other-worldly explanations for why things happen as they do. It struck me that God's will and karma are appealing notions for many because they provide reasons for happenings that often aren't pleasant. Or are surprising. For example, I know someone who got stage 4 lung cancer even though she never smoked. Thankfully, she's doing quite well, even after several years have passed since the…
9
Posted inBooks Morality

Rationality leads to progress and morality

In his new book, "Rationality," Steve Pinker ends with a Why Rationality Matters chapter. Here's some excerpts.  Pinker starts off by looking at human progress. Though the availability bias hides it from us, human progress is an empirical fact. When we look beyond the headlines to the trend lines, we find that humanity overall is healthier, richer, longer-lived, better fed, better educated, and safer from war, murder, and accidents than in decades and centuries past. Having documented these changes in two books, I'm often asked whether I "believe in progress." The answer is no. Like the humorist Fran Lebowitz, I don't…
23
Posted inReligions Science

Supernatural beliefs lack both causes and mechanisms

When I press on certain keys on my MacBook Pro keyboard, magic happens! Which you can see. Because I can touch type, words form on my laptop's screen. After I publish this post, the words appear on my Church of the Churchless blog. Of course, all this isn't really magic. There's a chain of causes that leads to the words appearing in a blog post. Underlying those causes are hidden mechanisms -- software, hardware, internet functions, and such -- that most of us don't understand very well. But what we're certain of is the overall way someone typing out thoughts…
8
Posted inChristianity/Jesus

Businesses shouldn’t assume their customers are Christian

Before Thanksgiving my wife and I got a mailing from Kaufman Homes, a business here in Salem, Oregon.  We use Kaufman's Home Maintenance, a quarterly service where a Kaufman handyman guy checks a bunch of things in your house and does minor repairs as needed. I like that I no longer have to maneuver through the crawl space under our house to change the filters on our two heat pump air handlers. That was never fun, and it got less fun the older I became. What surprised us was the decidedly Christian message Kaufman Homes sent to their customers. This…
5
Posted inBooks Reality Religions

Why people with religious delusions do fine in everyday life

I've finished Steven Pinker's book, Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters. I enjoyed it, though some chapters were a bit tedious. The final chapters, though, held my interest. Here's what I liked most in the next to last chapter, "What's Wrong With People?" Meaning, why do so many people believe such crazy irrational stuff? It starts off with a great George Carlin quote. Tell people there's an invisible man in the sky who created the universe, and the vast majority will believe you. Tell them the paint is wet, and they have to touch it…
2
Posted inAwareness

Be thankful for nothing. Which means, everything.

I'm not a grinch about Thanksgiving. I enjoy this holiday.  My wife just finished making an apple pie. Soon I'll prepare our main dish, a vegetarian Trader Joe's Turkey-Less Stuffed Roast, which requires all of my cooking skills: heating the oven to 375, basting the roast, and cooking it for 45 minutes.  Whew! I feel exhausted already. I'm also totally fine with feeling thankful. I just have a different view about what thankfulness means. Last night I saw people interviewed on the evening news about what they're thankful for. Family. Friends. Having a job. That sort of thing. OK. Totally…
10
Posted inConsciousness

Everybody’s brain is producing a kind of hallucination

Today I finished reading the final pages of Anil Seth's book, "Being You: A New Science of Consciousness." Here's a provocative passage from the Epilogue. Everything in conscious experience is a perception of sorts, and every perception is a kind of controlled -- or controlling -- hallucination. What excites me most about this way of thinking is how far it may take us.  Experiences of free will are perceptions. The flow of time is a perception. Perhaps even the three-dimensional structure of our experienced world and the sense that the contents of perceptual experience are objectively real -- these may…
52
Posted inBooks Consciousness

“Beast machine theory” explains consciousness well

Hate to break this to you, if you're a firm believer in immaterial consciousness, but we humans are animals. Specifically, mammals of the primate variety, close relatives of chimpanzees, gorillas, and such. In his book, "Being You: A New Science of Consciousness," Anil Seth lays out his well-informed view of consciousness. (He's a professor of cognitive and computational neuroscience at the University of Sussex.) Seth gave a TEDx talk about his beast machine theory.  Here's some of what Seth has to say in his book about the beast machine theory. The beast machine theory grounds experiences of world and self…
7
Posted inFree will Meaning of life

Free will is part of the human mind, not the universe

Free will as people almost always understand it is an illusion. There's little or no doubt about that, as I noted in a recent post.  Here's an idea that is well worth pondering. I've enjoyed doing just that as I go to sleep, letting my mind wrap itself around an intriguing notion. So far as we know, we humans are the only entity in the universe that doesn't exist in full accord with determinism -- causes and effects operating in a lawful, orderly manner. Oh, but what about randomness? Sure, randomness is real. Every programmer knows about random number generators.…
12
Posted inFree will

Spooky free will is an illusion

Everybody believes they have unfettered free will, yet almost certainly nobody does. This is just one of the illusions that Anil Seth debunks in his captivating book, "Being You: A New Science of Consciousness." I'm fascinated by free will. Of course, I don't have a choice in this. Seth makes a strong case for being skeptical about our ability to choose actions, thoughts, emotions, and such by somehow stepping outside of all influences other than...  That's what's so difficult to come up with. What could possibly reside in human consciousness that produces the "free" part of free will?  If something…
10
Posted inPersonal/Stories

Health problems are a window into how our minds work

Yesterday I got a probable diagnosis of glaucoma, an eye disease. I wrote about this in a post on my HinesSight blog, "Not so fun day: I probably have glaucoma." One bit of good news is that this was detected in an early stage, since I get an annual eye exam because I wear contact lenses and am severely nearsighted. Another aspect of getting the likely diagnosis is that it's given me an opportunity to observe how my mind has been dealing with the news. Which really is just another way of saying, How I have been dealing with the…
28
Posted inAtheism God Religions

What if God hates religions?

I'm an atheist who likes to imagine how God thinks. What allows me to do this is the same reason anyone is able to make a claim about God. Since there's no convincing evidence that God exists, every person has an equal opportunity to imagine what this non-existent entity is like -- in much the same way that anyone can come up with a fictional story about characters they conjure up in their mind. So I enjoy visualizing how irritated God is at religious people. God is fine with people who use drugs, drink too much, watch porn all the…
13
Posted inBooks Consciousness

The teletransportation paradox gives us clues about the “self”

Here's an excerpt from Anil Seth's book, "Being You: A New Science of Consciousness." I found it fascinating, even though it echoes ideas Derek Parfit wrote about in one of his books. But Seth describes this thought experiment in an intriguing way. After the excerpt, I'll share some observations about it. Let's begin our exploration of the self with a quick trip into the future. A century or so from now, teletransportation devices have been invented which can create exact replicas of any human being.  Just like the machines in Star Trek, they work by scanning a person in exquisite detail…
17
Posted inPersonal/Stories

Risk-taking is largely a personal decision

Writing a few days ago about how walking on the edge of a roof is great mindfulness training got me thinking in a couple of related directions. One is that how risky something is usually is a combination of objective fact and subjective interpretation. The other is that the first thing I did after coming up with the name for this blog back in 2004, was decide on a subtitle. Preaching the gospel of spiritual independence The two ideas are related, in my own mind at least. I want people to make an informed decision about what sort of spirituality,…
14
Posted inPersonal/Stories

Walking on the edge of a roof is great mindfulness training

Even though lots of people believe otherwise, we are physical beings living in a physical world. (If you disagree, share your factual evidence in a comment on this post. Hey, maybe a Nobel prize awaits you if you're able to prove that we're non-physical beings living in a physical world, or maybe two Nobel prizes if you can prove we're non-physical beings living in a non-physical world.) One reason I enjoy Zen Buddhism so much is that Zen is deeply rooted in physicality. Chop wood, carry water. Focus on the breath while keeping the spine straight in meditation. Students getting…
11