Posted inComments

No more comment moderation

I've decided to stop moderating (approving) comments, after a brief time doing otherwise. It's a burden on me, and an inconvenience to commenters, to have to do this.  What I hope is that people will stay on-topic as much as possible with their comments, putting comments unrelated to a blog post in an Open Thread. I've just added a new Open Thread. Old ones can be found by clicking on that category in the right sidebar. I believe in free speech. I also believe that speech should be founded on love, caring, and compassion to the degree us fallible human…
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Posted inOpen Threads

Open Thread 18 (free speech for comments)

Leave a comment on this post about anything you want to talk about. Though I haven't been doing too well on this, I'll try to remember to always have an Open Thread showing in the Recent Posts section in the right sidebar. If one isn't showing, I've added an Open Threads category in, naturally, the Categories section. You can always find an Open Thread that way. So if you're a believer in some form of religion, mysticism, or spirituality, this is where you can put your "praise God," "praise Guru," or "praise _______" comments.
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas

Singh brothers get into fight over loans to RSSB guru and his family

Well, it's been a while since Malvinder and Shivinder Singh, cousins of Gurinder Singh Dhillon, the guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas in India, have been in the news.  (Being bad at genealogy, I used to think they were nephews; now I'm pretty sure they are cousins.) But that changed yesterday. December 7 is remembered here in the United States as the day in 1941 when the Japanese attacked ships at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii.  Looks like the Singh brothers wanted to make that date memorable in India for their own brotherly fireworks. Check out a December 7 The Times…
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Posted inSpiritual practice/meditation

Here’s my foolproof guide to wise spiritual “investing”

The past couple of days have been ugly for investors in stock markets around the world, including here in the United States. But I've been pretty much unmoved and unworried by the downturn.  Why? Because quite a few years ago I decided to embrace index investing, where you don't try to be smarter than all the other guys/gals who invest, you just have a goal of doing as well as the general investment climate. A few years ago I wrote about this on one of my other blogs in "Index investing lets me relax in a stock market crash." And…
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Posted inBooks Buddhism

Spiritual illusions are as deceptive as worldly illusions

I enthusiastically embraced spiritual illusions for 35 years. I believed in God. I believed that God could be found by following the teachings of divine incarnations, God in human form. I believed I'd live on after my death. I believed in an eternal heaven beyond time and earthly tribulations. I believed spirituality required following certain commandments. This sounds like I was a Christian, right? No, wrong. I was a member of Radha Soami Satsang Beas, an Eastern form of religion known as Sant Mat. Its headquarters were in India, and the organization was led by a guru. Eventually I came…
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Posted inAtheism Comments

Why do religious people go on atheist sites?

Here's a positive review of my new comment policy on this blog, where I now moderate (approve) comments before they're published. One day in, I'm enjoying the lack of off-topic crazy comments from dogmatic religious believers.  I regularly exchange emails with the person who wrote what follows. John used to be religious, but now, like me, he's seen the atheist light.  John makes some good points. I don't know any atheists, which includes me, who go to religious sites and try to convert believers to atheism. But this churchless blog gets many visits and comments from religious people. Why? Well,…
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Posted inComments

Comments are back to being moderated. Religious craziness is the reason.

I just turned comment moderation back on for this blog. That felt good. My experiment is over with allowing people to post comments on their own, saying whatever they like (pretty much; I did have my limits). The breaking point came today when I scrolled through a bunch of comments on my most recent post, "Buddhist wisdom: pay attention to the breath until the self dissolves."  Those comments surpassed the usual level of religious dogmatism, inanity, incomprehensibility, and plain gibberish that I'm used to seeing from a group of core commenters who have been using this blog basically as a…
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Posted inBuddhism

Buddhist wisdom: pay attention to the breath until the self dissolves

My spiritual evolution has been a lot like my marital arts evolution. I'll explain. For about nine years I practiced traditional Shotokan karate. I got to the brown belt level, and did quite well in tournaments where I sparred against black belts with considerably more experience, and who were much younger than me. But when it came to testing, I was stuck. I wasn't being advanced from the initial brown belt level. Eventually it dawned on me that I was learning martial arts skills. But what I was learning wasn't what the Shotokan higher-ups wanted to see when it came…
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Posted inBuddhism Spiritual practice/meditation Taoism/Tai Chi

My “spiritual” Theory of Everything is coming along nicely

Once in a while I get a glimpse of how things really are, or ideally are, spiritually speaking. Now, I put "spiritual" in quotation marks in the title of this post, because the way I use the word, it has nothing to do with God or the supernatural -- which in my view don't exist. Rather, when I speak of spirituality, I mean a quest to understand how best to live life. The ancient Greeks called this philosophy, literally "love of wisdom." However, these days philosophy usually is considered to be not a way of life, but an academic discipline.…
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Posted inChristianity/Jesus Fundamentalism

Christian missionary killed by remote tribe shows idiocy of religion

So, here's a quiz for you. Someone learns about an island inhabited by about 50-100 members of a tribe that has had very little contact with civilization. The nation that the island is a part of has decreed that no outsiders are to set foot on the island. One reason is that the tribe members lack immunity to many diseases common in the outside world, so they could be decimated by contact with outsiders. Should this person:(A) Give up any idea of visiting the island. (B) Sneak onto the island with the intention of changing the tribe over to their way…
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Posted inReligions Science

Science touches reality. Religion only touches the human mind.

"We've got to get out of our own heads." I really liked this observation by Michael Shermer near the beginning of a podcast interview featuring him and Philip Goff. Shermer was speaking about how Eben Alexander claimed he went to heaven while in a coma, but actually there's solid evidence that he didn't. Heaven was just a place he made up in his head. Also, Shermer notes that Sam Harris, the noted atheist neuroscientist, writes in one of his books about taking MDMA (ecstasy) that led to a rather similar mystical experience. Except, Harris never claimed to have experienced a…
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Posted inReligions

Don’t let illusory scarcity scare you into religion

I rarely read self-help books, but I saw a story in TIME magazine about Brene Brown and decided to get one of her books. After reading some Amazon reviews, I settled on "Daring Greatly."  It's mainly about the courage to be vulnerable, to take chances even when the odds are against us, to reveal ourselves honestly without a guarantee that other people will like what they see. Brown brings up scarcity in an introductory chapter. Given the topics I study, I know I'm onto something when folks look away, quickly cover their faces with their hands, or respond with "ouch,…
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Posted inGod

Thank God you know God doesn’t exist

Here's some thoughts about Thanksgiving (holiday today in the United States) from "JB," a regular commenter on this blog. Can't disagree with anything he said. If God is in charge of this world, He/She/It would have to be a sadistic, uncaring psychopath.  Much more likely alternative: God doesn't exist. Here's JB's comment on a recent post: On this day of thanks, I also want to thank the precious lord God for all of his selfless care. I want to thank him for all of the children that are dying of cancer and all of the parents that spend every moment…
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Posted inBuddhism

Nirvana: the moment reactivity stops

I'm attracted to Buddhism, along with Taoism, because these are forms of spirituality that can be viewed without a lens of fantastical supernaturalism. Sure, many Buddhists and Taoists do embrace mystical mumbo-jumbo, but it is entirely possible to be a Buddhist or Taoist who considers that this earthly existence is the one and only life each of us will ever live, and that's just fine. Stephen Bachelor is a pleasingly secular Buddhist who has written several books from the standpoint of Buddhism as a practical way of living, not as a religion that demands belief in unbelievable stuff -- such…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas

The absurdity of believing there is Sach Khand (heaven)

Here's a guest post from the always-interesting Osho Robbins. Plus, a video Robbins made to accompany what follows. It has a "69" joke, so that alone leads me to recommend it. Robbins has an intriguing take on the Sant Mat version of spirituality. Since I wrote a book called Return to the One, I'm sympathetic to the notion of oneness.  However, I'm also sympathetic to the notion of non-oneness, since as Robbins observes, if everything was really One, there wouldn't be anybody who could stand outside of the oneness and say, "This One is absolutely wonderful!" (or we might say,…
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Posted inIndia Karma Religions

Three comments show absurdity of “karmic blaming”

Karma can be a dangerous concept. It's harmless enough if we simply think of it as the laws of cause and effect that guide our universe.  But when people extend this concept to include supernatural fantasies, such as that our actions in past lives have determined what happens to us in this life, then the notion of karma needs to be criticized harshly. The not-nice canine in the Dilbert comic strip, Dogbert, captured the essence of this nicely. And it doesn't matter whether someone uses the term "karma" or some other word. It's the idea of karmic blaming that has…
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Posted inGod Science

Stephen Hawking asks “Is there a God?” (Spoiler alert: No.)

Being a big fan of both science and Stephen Hawking, naturally I had to buy his last and most recent book, "Brief Answers to the Big Questions," which was published after he died this year.So far I've only read up through the first two questions, "Is there a God?" and "How did it all begin?" Since Hawking was an atheist, you can predict what the answers are. But I'll save the details for later in this post. First, I want to acknowledge Hawking's amazing courage and commitment to truth. He talks about the progression of his ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis),…
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Posted inAtheism Books Religions

“Seven Types of Atheism” is intellectually dishonest

Last month I shared a critical Amazon reader review of John Gray's book, Seven Types of Atheism, in a blog post: "Great review of 'Seven Types of Atheism' by someone who hasn't read the book." I said in the post that I wasn't going to buy the book. Then I changed my mind. Not sure why. Maybe I wanted to see if the book was as bad as I thought it would be. Now that I've read Seven Types of Atheism, I'm glad I did. Here's my own review. The most glaring irritating thing I found in the book was…
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Posted inConsciousness

We humans have selfhood without a self

Here's a big question, one of the biggest when it comes to understanding reality and how religions typically view what it means to be human: Do we have a self? Or adding an (important) capital letter, Do we have a Self? To kick off my discussion of these questions, here's some recent right-on comment observations from "JB." Brian: "there is nobody having an experience. There is just experience, which usually includes an experience of being, or having, a self." Rather than no-body having an experience, I would argue that there is a body having an experience. More precisely, I would…
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Posted inAwareness Books Consciousness

“On Having No Head” has a few simple truths

On Having No Head is a book by D.E. Harding. I'd bought and read it quite a few years ago. Then, when I needed to weed out unwanted books to make room for more, On Having No Head was given away.  Recently, though, I heard Sam Harris speak about the book in his Waking Up iPhone app, so I decided to re-buy and re-read it. Here's my review, which is of a second edition of the book that contains a "Bringing the story up to date" section that was written over forty years after Harding wrote the first edition. My…
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