Posted inReligions

Life is suffering. The opioid crisis is one proof of that.

Kudos to TIME magazine for devoting an entire issue to a special report on the opioid crisis in the United States, "The Opioid Diaries." The photographs and accompanying text were disturbing, but that was the point. To show life as it is, not as how we might like it to be.  I wish there was an easy answer to suffering. But there isn't. It is hard, impossible really, to judge people who, in their quest to relieve their suffering, turn to drugs. Here's an example from the TIME story. "I got in a car accident and was in the hospital…
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Posted inReality Religions

Religion is a warm bath. Atheism is a cold shower.

I love not only warm baths, but hot ones. It feels good to be immersed in water close to my body temperature. It relaxes me, makes me feel comfortable, sometimes puts me to sleep. When I want to wake up, though, a cold shower is much better. Now, I don't actually take cold showers unless our water heater is broken and I'm desperate to get clean. However, I have taken a cold shower of truth, which is why I chose atheism over religion after some 35 years of being an ardent believer in God, soul, spirit, and heaven. (Eastern religion…
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Posted inComments Religions

“Your mind is the perfect epitome of religious fanaticism”

I admire thoughtful, rational, well-reasoned put-downs of religious fanatics. That's why I'm sharing a marvelous comment on a recent post by "Appreciative Reader" that totally destroys the credibility of another commenter, "D.r."The whole comment is well worth reading as a great example of how to respond to religious bullshit. But my favorite part of Appreciative Reader's comment begins with the one-sentence paragraph, It occurs to me that you may be wondering why I’m wasting so much time with you.I really resonate with the last part of the comment. It makes so much sense, I'll repeat it here: But I come now…
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Posted inBooks

Clean up your life. Be left with the bare tragedies.

I'm enjoying Jordan Peterson's book, "12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos." Peterson is a psychologist who became a celebrated professor through his lectures and You Tube videos. Below is an excerpt that I liked from his chapter on Rule 6: Set Your House in Perfect Order Before You Criticize the World.I don't actually believe that this is either necessary or a good thing -- to get one's life all perfect before criticizing the world. Hey, I'm not about to give up my criticisms of Trump just because I have some failings. But in general what Peterson says makes…
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Posted inBooks Personal/Stories

Pay attention to the small things of life, because they’re the important things

Walking back to our rural home after a dog walk, I was struck by how a leafless oak tree at the edge of our yard looked against the late afternoon sky. It was a lesson in fractals, those amazing shapes that repeat at many levels. Each twig was a reflection of each branch which was a reflection of the entire tree. Which got me to thinking about how the small things in life are a reflection of the big things in life. To put it another way, the meaning we get from small things is the same meaning we get…
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Posted inGod

This atheist has a few simple questions for religious believers

I don't believe in God. I'm virtually certain that God doesn't exist, because there is no demonstrable evidence for a god or gods. Thus I deeply doubt that anyone, alive or dead, has ever known anything about God other than what they make up in their own mind. So I've got some simple questions for religious believers -- a number of whom are regular readers of this blog (which is kind of weird; it's sort of like avid meat-eaters frequenting a vegetarian web site). I understand that many religious believers just have faith that God exists. They don't claim to…
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Posted inFree will

A justice system not based on a belief in free will would be much better

Free will is an illusion. There's little doubt about this, though it will make some time for this scientific fact to be accepted by most people. Wrong habits of thinking take time to change. Here's a comic strip example. In my most recent post about free will, I gave a poor review to a book that somehow managed to conclude that even though determinism rules, and free will is an illusion, the justice system still should assume that a person was freely responsible for making the choice to commit a crime.This continues to leave the door wide open to making…
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Posted inBooks Free will

“Free Will Explained” is a poor explanation of free will

I had high expectations when I began reading Dan Barker's book, "Free Will Explained." Being a firm non-believer in free will, I figured that Barker, an avowed atheist, would give free will the same de-bunking as Sam Harris and numerous other scientifically minded authors have. I'm a free will junkie. I find this subject fascinating. I've read most of the books that argue free will doesn't exist, even though we humans believe we possess it. So since the subtitle of Barker's book is How Science and Philosophy Converge to Create a Beautiful Illusion, I expected a rational, reasonable, factual explanation…
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Posted inBuddhism

What is enlightenment good for?

David Chapman, a philosophically-inclined Buddhist'y guy I follow on Twitter, raised an interesting question: It sure is a reasonable question. But I'd like to go further by ditching the word "practical." Which makes the question, in statement form, Show us some thing this "enlightenment" is good for. Meaning, the way I see it, how would anyone know whether someone is enlightened?  Substitute a wording of your choice for enlightened, if you like. Spiritually advanced. God-realized. Possesses an elevated consciousness. The point is, well, to be able to point to some characteristic of such a person that distinguishes them from an…
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Posted inTaoism/Tai Chi

Wu wei and no free will work well together

Today I got this question via email: Hey Brian, quick question.  But there might not be a quick answer.  LOL Do the concept of  wu wei and the absence of free will work together?  For some reason, I’m having trouble really understanding wu wei and how it works. Most of the time, I think I understand it from an intellectual stand point.  But then walking in it is a whole different animal. Wu wei is a Taoist term that literally means non-doing. But "effortless effort" is how I think of wu wei. It's when things are going really smoothly, when we're…
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Posted inMorality

Sam Harris sums up morality in eight tweets

Sam Harris did a nice job of encapsulating what morality is all about, from a broad perspective, in these eight Twitter tweets: Getting from “Is” to “Ought” 1/ Let’s assume that there are no ought’s or should’s in this universe. There is only what *is*—the totality of actual (and possible) facts. 2/ Among the myriad things that exist are conscious minds, susceptible to a vast range of actual (and possible) experiences. 3/ Unfortunately, many experiences suck. And they don’t just suck as a matter of cultural convention or personal bias—they really and truly suck. (If you doubt this, place your…
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Posted inComments Open Threads

Open Thread 12 (free speech for comments)

Since preachy comments are continuing to show up on posts I've written that have nothing to do with the topic, on Tuesday I'm going to start deleting those comments if they aren't in an Open Thread -- like this one. Leave a comment on this post about anything you want to talk about. 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. Starting Tuesday,…
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Posted inBooks Plotinus

I’m pleased that my ideas about God have changed

I just had an enjoyable hour-long phone conversation with a man who wanted to talk with me about my book, "Return to the One: Plotinus's Guide to God-Realization."  It has been so long since I'd picked up the book, I read through it really quickly this morning to refresh my memory about what I'd written. I have to say that I was impressed. Hey, I made a lot of sense!  However, early on in our phone conversation I had to tell this guy that my views about both Plotinus, and spirituality in general, have changed quite a bit since I…
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Posted inFree will Reality Science

Free will and religion are both comforting fantasies

I've just about finished re-reading a great book by a British attorney, Richard Oerton, who has spent half a century pondering the nature, or rather lack thereof, of free will.  Previously I've written about "The Nonsense of Free Will: Facing Up to a False Belief" in these posts: Free will is a wonderful thing to loseSitting in the jury box, I deny free willBelief in free will linked to desire to punish Oerton makes some highly persuasive arguments against free will, building his case with a mixture of logic and facts. I'm enjoying his book even more the second time…
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Posted inScience

Life of a carbon atom fills me with irreligious awe

Here's a scan of a page from a wonderful book by Caleb Scharf, "The Zoomable Universe: An Epic Tour Through Cosmic Scale, from Almost Everything to Nearly Nothing."After I highlighted the section in yellow, I wound my way through the nineteen steps in the scientifically-valid journey of a carbon atom that begins 10 billion years ago inside a massive star, and ends today with the eating of a potato.  Coincidentally, I ate a baked (OK, microwaved) potato for dinner tonight.  When I read the page below this morning, I found it surprisingly moving. Sure, I was familiar with the idea…
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Posted inScience

Good Jerry Coyne piece about free will (the lack thereof)

I'm a big fan of writings that debunk free will. (Just can't help myself.) Here's a good piece by Jerry Coyne that appeared on his Evolution is True blog: "Dawkins and Krauss on free will." It makes the same points that I've made in my own writings about free will, albeit in a clearer fashion. Here's an excerpt. But you really should read the entire post.  If you don’t believe in libertarian free will, then the concept of moral responsibility becomes problematic, though the problem of responsibility itself is not problematic. What changes is how we reward and, especially, punish people. Think…
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Posted inGod

Egos gone wild: religious believers thinking God is on their side

First off, I've been there and done that: thinking God is on my side. So when I say that this is a crazy belief, I'm criticizing an earlier version of myself -- along with everybody else who has an ego massive enough to believe such a thing.Which includes the Green family, founders and owners of the Hobby Lobby chain of craft stores. Yesterday I wrote a post on one of my other blogs, Salem Political Snark, "Here's 5 good reasons not to shop at Salem's Hobby Lobby." As part of my Google research for that post, I listened to an interview…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas

Determinism and hope are good substitutes for karma and faith

I've always been scientifically-minded. What's changed is that I've realized the absurdity of trying to cram Eastern (or Western, for that matter) supernaturalism into a scientific worldview.  For example, when I was a devotee of an India-based spiritual group, Radha Soami Satsang Beas, I wrote a book for RSSB called "Life is Fair." It set forth a karmic justification for vegetarianism. Much of the book talked about the positive health effects of being a vegetarian rather than a meat eater. But some of the book discussed karmic theory in which causes and effects carry over from one life to another…
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Posted inUncategorized

No, faith isn’t better than doubt. Here’s why.

When I saw the title of a New York Times opinion piece, "How Can I Possibly Believe That Faith Is Better Than Doubt?", I was pretty sure that I was going to disagree with it.  After reading what Peter Wehner wrote, I know that I disagree with him. Here's what rubbed me the wrong way in Wehner's essay. Let's start with this paragraph.But faith itself, while not the converse of reason, is still distinct from it. If it seems like that’s asking too much — if you think leaps of faith are for children rather than adults — consider this: Materialists,…
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