Posted inBooks Mystics Radha Soami Satsang Beas

I respond to criticism of my book that I no longer fully believe in

As noted in a post three weeks ago, I've gotten God's Whisper, Creation's Thunder back in print, even though I no longer believe in much of the mystical/spiritual aspect of the book.  Spencer Tepper, a frequent commenter on this blog, bought a copy of the book, which I appreciate. I also appreciate a comment he left where he critiqued some of what I said in the first part of God's Whisper, Creation's Thunder. It's a bit strange that I feel the need to defend a book that I don't totally believe in, but Tepper focused on a topic that I…
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Posted inBuddhism Death/Rebirth

Zen’s tiger and strawberry story is about dealing with death

The older I get -- I'm 69 -- the more I resonate with the Zen story of a man who had a bad day when he was chased by a tiger. Which turned into a much worse day when another tiger and a couple of mice showed up.  A man was walking across a field when he saw a tiger. Fearing for his life, the man fled, but the tiger gave chase. The man reached the edge of a cliff, and just as he thought the tiger would get him, he spotted a vine growing over the edge of the…
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Posted inBooks Taoism/Tai Chi

The Book of Chuang Tzu praises uselessness

There's religious, spiritual, philosophical, and mystical writings. Then there's The Book of Chuang Tzu.  It stands apart, because there's nothing else like it. This Taoist classic is humorous, crazy, confusing, paradoxical, entertaining, wise, weird, and so much else besides.  I've read it several times, in various translations. It's one of my favorite books, in large part because there's no way to pin down exactly what's being taught in the collection of, as the back cover says, "the stories, tales, jokes and anecdotes that have gathered around the figure of Chuang Tzu." Since I'm feeling increasingly useless, the older I get,…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories

“Burner on!” episode shows danger in trusting our intuition

Many religiously-minded people put a lot of stock in feelings. Meaning, those intuitions that appear full-blown in the mind, seemingly from out of nowhere, that just seem So Absolutely True, they demand to be believed.  Like, God is love, Jesus is watching over me, and such. Well, last weekend I had an experience that calls into question the veracity of intuitions like that. It started with my Sunday morning habit of making pancakes for breakfast.  More accurately, one large pancake. Which I cook in a correspondingly large pan, that's heated by a large burner on our electric cooktop.  After eating…
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Posted inDeath/Rebirth

Being religious won’t save you from suicide

Just came across this piece by Jesse Bering in Skeptic, "No, Being Religious Will Not Save You From Suicide." Well worth reading. Makes some great points. Here's an excerpt. Among the more obnoxious things I’ve read in the wake of Anthony Bourdain’s death is that if only he had been a man of faith, he wouldn’t have taken his own life. Consider the almost sneering commentary offered by Bill Donohue, President of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, in a syndicated piece written less than a day after the rogue chef’s body was found hanging by the belt…
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Posted inBuddhism Spiritual practice/meditation

Mindfulness has become my meditation

Back in my true-believing religious days, when I embraced an Eastern form of mysticism that espoused several hours of daily eyes-closed meditation, I thought that the ultimate aim of life was to experience higher realms of reality beyond the physical. Of course, I had a job to go to, a wife and daughter, worldly activities I enjoyed. But I viewed these as mostly distinct from my spiritual goal of god-realization -- those things were part of my karma; important, yet not what my life's highest purpose was all about. I'm grateful that my eyes have been opened to the flaws…
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Posted inHappiness

Happiness lies in ordinary things

Am I happier since I gave up the fantasy of religion? Probably. It's a big relief to not have a cosmic weight on my back -- the expectation that I need to do this and that, plus that and this, in order to be worthy of being admitted to God's heavenly realm.  That's a lot of pressure, believing that the fate of my supposedly immortal soul rests on whether I've been fortunate enough to find a path that leads to God-realization, and, having hopefully found the right path, on whether my efforts to follow it will meet with success. In…
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Posted inDeath/Rebirth

Death of 14-year-old boy shows appeal of religion

Death sucks. But death is inevitable. It happens to everybody. There's no exceptions. Yet for senior citizens  like me -- I'm 69 -- we've had many years of living that make our eventual demise seem, if not appealing, at least part of the natural course of things. A child's death, though... that's a whole different thing. Today I read a story in our local newspaper, the Salem Statesman Journal, about the death of a 14-year-old boy from a rare form of bone cancer.  It was heartbreaking.  Jack Schumacher lived for baseball. He was good at math, loved LEGOs and loved…
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Posted inBooks Personal/Stories

“God’s Whisper, Creation’s Thunder” is back in print, shorter and simplified

Big news! Also, kind of weird news.  Now-atheist me has gotten a second edition of the book written by previous-religious-believer me back in print. It took me many years to do this after the initial publisher went of business, but I finally got around to it. (Note: the paperback version was available May 8 on Amazon, but it took this long for a Kindle version to be prepared, then linked to the paperback listing on Amazon.) Yes, Amazon has "God's Whisper, Creation's Thunder: Echoes of Spiritual Reality in the New Physics" available for $13 in paperback and $3.99 for the…
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Posted inBooks Buddhism

Can’t stop quoting from “Ending the Pursuit of Happiness: A Zen Guide”

Zen, along with Buddhism in general, teaches that nothing is permanent, everything changes. So even though right now I feel like I can't stop sharing quotes from my re-reading of Barry Magid's book, Ending the Pursuit of Happiness: A Zen Guide, clearly I will at some point.  Like maybe tomorrow, not today. Here's more passages from the book that appealed to my churchless consciousness. Which follow a Zen cartoon. "Karma means "cause and effect," which is another way of describing interconnection and change. Enlightenment is the realization of our being the ongoing product of interconnection and change -- it is…
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Posted inOpen Threads

Open Thread 14 (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. So you can always find an Open Thread that way.
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Posted inBooks Buddhism

Great quotes from “Ending the Pursuit of Happiness: A Zen Guide”

I'm a big fan of Zen, though I've never actually practiced with a Zen teacher, and I'm turned off by overly dogmatic or religious versions of Zen Buddhism.  Yesterday I was idly glancing at the Zen section of my bookcase and noticed a book that I'd read nine years ago and blogged about in "Search for happiness (and self) called off." I'm enjoying a re-reading of Barry Magid's Ending the Pursuit of Happiness: A Zen Guide. Magid is a psychoanalyst with an appealing take on Zen. He founded the Ordinary Mind Zendo in New York City and still teaches there.…
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Posted inGod

Five reasons why I don’t believe in God

Since 2004 I've written 2,365 posts on this here Church of the Churchless blog. That's a scarily large number, which testifies to my commitment to churchlessness after spending 35 years being firmly churched in an Indian guru-based form of religiosity. During the past fourteen years I've talked a lot about why I no longer believe in God. I've put forth numerous reasons for my conversion to atheism. Here's a fairly brief description of five key reasons.  (1) Existence must always have existed. Most religions teach that God brought our universe into existence. But I've never heard any believer argue that…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories Spiritual practice/meditation

How I’m content with an atheistic world view

Today I got an email message from someone who asked a great question about finding contentment with an atheistic world view. I dashed off a response right away, because I loved how this person described their quandary, and how clearly their youthful angst was expressed. Speaking of love, which the person said was their "entire meaning in life," you'll see that I didn't mention love in my reply. I thought about this only after I'd sent my response. It isn't that love isn't important to me, or that it isn't a big part of my life. I guess it is…
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Posted inBooks Morality

Why do gods and spirits matter?

The title of this blog post asks a question that's a chapter title in Pascal Boyer's challenging, but intensely interesting, book, "Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought." Boyer is an anthropologist who is also well-versed in psychology. His book isn't an easy read, but I'm enjoying making my way through it, occasionally by skipping a chapter and moving ahead to a chapter that grabs my attention more. Not surprisingly, I'm carefully reading the "Why do gods and spirits matter?" chapter, since this is such an important question. Below is how the chapter starts off. I decided to share…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas Religions

Why this atheist is more saintly than religious believers

This proves nothing except that seeming synchronicities sometimes occur in a pseudo-miraculous fashion. This afternoon I was thinking about what to write about on this here Church of the Churchless blog, and came up with the idea of talking about how I happily allow about 90% of the blog comments to be from religious believers, almost all of whom are still adherents of the Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) faith that I deconverted from about fourteen years ago -- after being a strong RSSB devotee for some thirty-five years.I was going to point out that this shows how much more…
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Posted inReality Religions Science

A test that science passes and religion fails: reality “kicks back”

How do we know what is real? This is a question that has occupied philosophers and scientists for as long as we humans have been pondering the nature of reality. I don't pretend to know the answer, but I resonate with physicist David Deutsch's approach to the question. In his book, "The Fabric of Reality," Deutsch views explanations as being key to understanding what is real. He writes: Explanations are not justified by the means by which they were derived; they are justified by their superior ability, relative to rival explanations, to solve the problems they address. That is why…
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Posted inReality

All problems and solutions are within the mind, not the world

One reason I love to read is that a few sentences in a book can make me go Wow! or Whoa! to such an extent, I feel like it is worth reading hundreds of pages to be exposed to a single fresh thought. That happened to me this morning as I was reading the "Criteria for Reality" chapter in physicist David Deutsch's book, The Fabric of Reality. Here's what grabbed my attention: Galileo may have seen the world as a book in which the laws of nature are written in mathematical symbols. But that is strictly a metaphor; there are…
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Posted inAwareness Science

Awareness is a process, not a thing

I'm aware of typing on my laptop right now. And after writing those words, I'm also aware that I'm aware of typing on my laptop. This second type of awareness is called meta-awareness, a term I came across in a book I'm reading, "Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body." The authors, Daniel Goleman and Richard Davidson, write: When we did our first vipassana courses in India, we found ourselves immersed hour after hour in noting the comings and goings of our mind, cultivating stability by simply noticing rather than following where those thoughts, impulses,…
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