Posted inReligions

Memes like “God promises life after death” explain popularity of religion

We usually think that religions require people to believe in certain things. Like God, heaven, life after death. But what if religiosity is more akin to a tune you just can't get out of your head than a consciously arrived-at system of beliefs? Memes, according to Wikipedia, are "ideas, symbols, or practices that can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena with a mimicked theme." They propagate and evolve much like genes do: through natural selection. Here's how Wikipedia says memes operate in the area of religion. Aaron Lynch attributed the…
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Posted inChristianity/Jesus

I’m not a Christian. So why is my athletic club closed on Easter Sunday?

Some holidays are secular, like the Fourth of July or President's Day. It doesn't bother me when businesses close on a genuinely national holiday.  But Easter? It's a purely Christian day, a celebration of Jesus supposedly being resurrected from the dead.  I don't believe in any sort of God, including the Christian variety. Naturally I also don't believe that Jesus was the Son of God, nor that he came back to life after being dead. Lots of other people have different reasons for not viewing Easter as any sort of special day. Many embrace some other religion.  So why does…
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Posted inBuddhism Radha Soami Satsang Beas Taoism/Tai Chi

Flexible improvisation is a better way of living than rigid religion

Rules are fine. Except when they aren't.  For me, one of the most enjoyable things about giving up on the ridiculousness of religion is no longer having to comply with rigid rules, dogmas, commandments, rituals, and such.  Every religion has its own peculiar absurdities. Of course, what is absurd to an outsider will make sense to an insider. At least if the insider doesn't think about what's being required too much.  Here's an example: the mystical meditation path I followed for about thirty years demanded that followers be vegetarians. This wasn't a problem for me, since I'd stopped eating meat…
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Posted inReality

Perhaps “why?” is a word without meaning

Like young children, we adults also love to ask Why?  It just seems so natural to want to understand why our car won't start, why our spouse is angry with us, why we've got a stomach ache.  I'm not denying the usefulness of why, of seeking causes, of fathoming the source from which a certain aspect of reality has sprung.  However, more and more, I'm beginning to sense that the question which we take for granted -- why? -- may lack meaning beyond the minds of us humans.  Of course, this could be said of anything. Even when it comes…
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Posted inTaoism/Tai Chi

The truth of who we are lies without, not within

For about 35 years my daily meditation practice was aimed at "going within." This was the teaching of the Indian guru I followed, Charan Singh.  The assumption was that there is an unchanging conscious essence within us that could be termed soul. By leaving aside both impressions of the outside world and mental images (thoughts, emotions, and such), what remained in closed-eye meditation would be revealed as Who We Truly Are. Well, my ideas have changed.  I now realize that this was a highly limiting view of what spirituality and self-knowledge is all about. It was a notion founded in…
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Posted inHumor

Jesus and Mohammed talk about truth vs. facts

Here's a good cartoon from the Jesus and Mo web site. Yeah, what if the truth isn't factual?  Well, then it isn't true. Not that this would bother religious believers, because their "truth" is whatever they want it to be, whatever their faith commands.  Which doesn't make it true, of course. Doesn't something have to be factual to be true? It seems obvious that this is the case with objective reality, where facts are the common ground that enable different people to understand the same phenomenon. Yet it also appears that even subjective reality, such as an emotion or dream, also…
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Posted inDeath/Rebirth

Watch this “Adam ruins death” video. Truthful, blunt, non-religious.

My wife and I are big fans of "Adam Ruins Everything." Here's how TruTV describes this entertaining and informative series. In Adam Ruins Everything, host and investigative comedian Adam Conover embarks on a comically inventive yet unrelentingly serious quest to reveal the hidden truths behind everything you know and love. Tackling topics ranging from the workplace and voting to forensic science and security, he gives you not just fun facts to share with your friends, but information that will make you see the world in a whole new way. If knowledge is power, then Adam Conover will have you laughing…
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Posted inReligions

My wife, Laurel, is on an atheist letter-to-the-editor writing mission. Every month she submits another letter to our local newspaper, the Salem (Oregon) Statesman Journal.  Here's her March letter (click on the link to read the online comments). Nicely done, Laurel.  Question those who flaunt "religious arrogance" Could religious beliefs survive if children were not indoctrinated into religion from an early age by their families and cultures, and instead were allowed to decide whether religions make sense when they are old enough to examine the evidence and logic? Why do almost all religious believers believe in the religion their parents or…
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Posted inReality Science

Have faith that reality is better than any belief

One of my first Church of the Churchless posts, "Just have faith," was written in November 2004. It's still one of my favorites. Re-reading it today, I was pleased that I still agree with just about everything in it.  The reason: even though thirteen years ago I was more open to the hypothesis of God and life after death than I am now, the method of open-minded scientific faith that should be used to investigate all sorts of hypotheses -- both worldly and spiritual -- rings as true to me today as it did back then.  My personal research into…
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Posted inBooks Spiritual practice/meditation

How meditation helped Yuval Harari write “Sapiens,” a terrific book

I absolutely loved Sapiens, a book by a historian that was like no history book I'd ever read before. It was filled with wonderfully fresh insights -- Big Astounding Ideas rather than little boring facts. My blog posts about the book will give you a feel for what the author, Yuhal Harari, wrought.  "Religion is just one of many stories humans have imagined""Imagined orders -- like religions -- depend on shaky myths"Given how much I admired Sapiens, when I saw the title of a post by Ezra Klein on the Vox site, I knew that I had to read "Yuval…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas

Looks like God in Human Form isn’t more powerful than a VCAT member

Here's a Radha Soami Satsang Beas related newspaper story that came to my attention via someone's Twitter feed that I follow: "Opponents to religious group Radha Soami Satsang Beas' worship centre in Green Wedge at Carrum Downs score win at VCAT." (VCAT stands for Victorian Civil & Administrative Tribunal) A religious group’s plan for a large worship centre in Carrum Downs has been scuttled after opponents had a stunning win at VCAT. In a decision handed down yesterday, VCAT member Michael Deidun overturned Frankston Council’s approval of a permit for the Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) group’s new Australian headquarters…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas

Gurinder Singh, RSSB guru, “hale and hearty” after medical tests

Having been a member for many years of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), a mystical/meditation-based spiritual organization headquartered in India, I'm still somewhat interested in going-on regarding the group's current guru, Gurinder Singh. So when someone I follow on Twitter shared a link to "Radha Soami Sect Chief Gurinder Singh Dhillon returns from Singapore hale and hearty," I was curious to read this Punjab News Express story. Note: Dera refers to the main RSSB center in the Punjab; "lac" is a hundred thousand. Punjab News Express/Jagmohan Singh AMRITSAR: Radha Soami Sect Chief Gurinder Singh Dhillon today who had flown to Singapore following…
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Posted inMorality Universe

Rejoice in the glorious indifference of the universe

I'm no Carl Sagan, but after coming up with the thought expressed in the title of this blog post I did some Googling to find an image to share which expressed that sentiment. So Carl Sagan and I are on the same indifferent wavelength, the difference regarding our realization of indifference perhaps being that I find this worthy of rejoicing in the gloriousness of it. Which is a decidedly minority opinion, because most people fall into these Belief Camps, which are not mutually exclusive: (1) Believing in a God who loves us, cares for us, watches out for us. Usually…
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Posted inPolitics

Trump is trying to turn United States into a theocracy. Resist!

There are lots of reasons to dislike what President Trump (I hate writing those two words) is doing to our country. He's out to wreck the environment, trash human rights, destroy our relations with international allies, further enrich the already wealthy, and make women into second-class citizens.  But now there's another big reason to Resist The Idiot: news that Trump is out to make our constitutional democracy into a Christian theocracy.  When I woke up this morning the first outrage to appear on my laptop was "Trump Vows to 'Destroy' Law Banning Political Activity by Churches." President Trump vowed Thursday…
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Posted inMorality Science

Without magical thinking, the American flag is just a piece of cloth

Recently KGW, a Portland (Oregon) television station, had a story about a military veteran who was intensely distraught when some people protesting Trump's inauguration burned the American flag.  Eric Post, who served in the Marines, made an emotional Facebook video that's been viewed over 2.5 million times. His basic argument is that anyone who burns the flag doesn't believe in American ideals, doesn't respect the sacrifices of soldiers, and is a coward.  Of course, flag burners look upon themselves differently. They consider themselves patriots. They view flag-burning as free speech protected by the Constitution, which the Supreme Court has ruled…
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Posted inReality Science

Reality is a terrible thing to waste — yet religions and politicians do

What is real? This is one of the most important questions. I've grappled with it for my entire adult life.  The basic problem I or anyone else faces in answering that question is that we humans are subjective beings who exist in an objective world.  So subjectivity and objectivity are intermingled in everything we do, which includes grappling with the nature of reality. Wisdom, in my admittedly subjective opinion, largely lies in recognizing the difference between "I believe," "I feel," and similar I-based views, and "It is true that..." The latter sort of statement refers to an intersubjective reality, which…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas Religions

HBOs “The Young Pope” reminds me of some Indian gurus

Last night my wife, Laurel, and I watched the first episode of the HBO series, The Young Pope. It was weirdly realistic while also being strangely fantastical. The official trailer will give you a feel for the Young Pope, masterfully played by Jude Law. Laurel, being a retired psychotherapist, didn't have any trouble diagnosing the newly elevated Pope Pius XIII: psychopath. The Young Pope is controlling, manipulative, hypocritical, and charismatic. In other words, he is like lots of other religious leaders in both the West and East. They prey on the misguided faith of their followers. They profit from being…
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Posted inBooks Vedanta/Advaita

Osho on how life is purposeless (a good thing!)

A few days ago somebody emailed me a document about how life is purposeless, since I'd recently blogged about "The joy of living in a meaningless world." They weren't sure who had written the piece, but thought it was Osho (previously known as Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh). They were right. I found this out via a Scribd file, which I've copied in below.  I like what Osho says. I agree with almost everything in the piece, which is an excerpt from a book he wrote, "Vedanta: Seven Steps to Samadhi." Because it is about 3,000 words long, and some people may not…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories Spiritual practice/meditation

The joy of living in a meaningless world

The deeper I dive into atheism, the more blissful those warm waters of faithlessness seem. Which is a big change from my early non-believing years, when I often felt that something important was missing from my life. That something was a built-in, ready-made, out-there-to-be-discovered meaning of existence. A spiritual shoulder to lean on, a cosmic compass to guide my way, an uplifting understanding of dependable solid ground lying beneath the shifting sands of everyday experience. Even after I'd given up a belief in God or any other obviously supernatural entity, I had a lingering feeling that is difficult to put…
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Posted inSpiritual practice/meditation

I’m getting more skeptical about mindfulness

I've meditated every day, with a few exceptions, for over 45 years. For a long time I was a super-meditator, spending 1 1/2 to 2 hours at a time on a quest for the Meaning Of It All (MOIA).  Failing to find the elusive MOIA, I've shifted to 20 minutes of morning meditation, half of it guided via my Calm iPhone app, and half freestyling on my own.  Having discarded a religious motivation for meditating -- I no longer believe in enlightenment, soul travel, or union with a universal consciousness -- I've embraced mindfulness as a secular alternative.  Be here…
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