Posted inFree will

Giving up blame and shame is a big benefit of not believing in free will

For most people, me certainly included, blame is a two-edged sword. It can feel good to wield one edge against people we think have done something wrong (or lots of things wrong). Just to pull a name out of my cranium, Donald Trump comes to mind. But when the other edge is used against us, we often feel like we're being blamed unfairly. After all, our intentions were good. Things just didn't turn out as we expected. The same applies to shame. We may think that other people should feel ashamed of something they did, while we resist the idea…
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Posted inIndia Radha Soami Satsang Beas

RSSB and izzat – “honor culture”

Here's another interesting guest post about Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) from the anonymous person who has shared other messages with me via the Contact form on this blog. Since they don't use an actual email address on the form, I want to say in this fashion that I apologize if any previous messages have been sent to me that I've seemingly ignored. Actually, I never received them, since I didn't realize until recently that the Contact form -- which worked initially when I moved this blog to the WordPress platform after my previous blogging service went out of business…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories Radha Soami Satsang Beas

Sometimes it’s necessary to do everything wrong in order to get something right

Right. Wrong. We all use those words a lot. But often we don't really understand what they mean. Most of us, me certainly included, typically view right and wrong as moral dichotomies. As in, Trump's immigration policy is right; Trump's immigration policy is wrong. But actually that sort of black and white attitude is itself wrong, because life usually is composed of shades of gray. Here's an example. I've been playing Klondike, a solitaire game, for many years on my iPhone. In 2011 I wrote about the philosophical side of the game: "Klondike solitaire -- a fine philosophy of life."…
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Posted inGod Radha Soami Satsang Beas

Most spiritual teachers and gurus are ignorant of their subject matter

I've had lots of teachers in my life. In schools. In sports. In martial arts. In all kinds of other things. The common denominator that unites my teachers, the good ones at least, is that there knew a lot about the subject they were helping me to learn. After all, what's the point of having a teacher if they don't know more than you do about a subject? That question played a large role in my decision to part company with Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), a religious organization headquartered in India led a guru considered to be God in…
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Posted inConsciousness Neuroscience

If A.I. is thinking, this argues for the materialistic nature of human consciousness

In my last post, "Landscape of Consciousness is an amazing web site that maps 350 theories of consciousness," I said that I strongly believe that materialistic theories where the brain is viewed as the source of consciousness make the most sense and are the most likely to be true. A couple of letters in New Scientist about the above-linked article provide some reasons for materialism. From Andy McGee,  Adelaide, South Australia Further to your exploration of the wide variety of ideas about consciousness, biological consciousness is the only one we know exists. It is most likely to have come from…
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Posted inConsciousness

Landscape of Consciousness is an amazing web site that maps 350 theories of consciousness

If, like me, you're fascinated by the phenomenon of consciousness, have your own favorite notion about what consciousness is and isn't, yet are open to exploring other theories of consciousness, you're going to find the Landscape of Consciousness web site a treasure trove of information and insights. I learned about it from an article by Robert Lawrence Kuhn in the October 25, 2025 issue of New Scientist, "Landscape of consciousness." The online article is titled  "What 350 different theories of consciousness reveal about reality." Here's a PDF file of the article. What 350 different theories of consciousness reveal about reality…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas

RSSB guru, Gurinder Singh Dhillon, meets in jail with man accused of laundering drug money

Since I was a member of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) for 35 years before becoming disillusioned with the organization, I occasionally get messages from people about their own dissatisfaction with RSSB and the guru who has led RSSB since 1990, Gurinder Singh Dhillon. I share them as an example of how religions and religious leaders can go astray. Recently I was sent a link to a September 23, 2025 story in the Hindustan Times, "Dera Beas head meets Bikram Majithia In Nabha jail." (RSSB is headquartered in the Punjab province of India.) It's a short story, so I'll share…
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Posted inDeath/Rebirth Personal/Stories

To suddenly realize life is precious because death is inevitable — an atheist blessing

I've had this feeling before. It happened to me today. I'm sure I'll have it again. It comes with the territory of being alive. At least for me. My usual late afternoon dog walk with our Husky mix, Mooka, started off with no surprises. We take the same route every day. It takes us about half an hour, plus or minus, depending on much sniffing Mooka does along the way. We start from our rural south Salem (Oregon) house, walk along some trails on our property and easements on neighboring properties, then up to the road that leads back to…
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Posted inReality Science

Cause and effect may actually rule in the quantum realm, according to a fresh theoretical approach

There's something about a provocative unproven theory in physics that appeals to me much more than a provocative unproven theory in religion, mysticism, and spirituality in general. Probably it's because physicists approach a deeper understanding of reality from a solid factual foundation, while that isn't the case with religion, mysticism, and spirituality in general -- unless the new idea there is completely based on natural, rather than supernatural, notions. So when the November 29-December 5 issue of New Scientist appeared in my mailbox with the cover blaring The Quantum Leap -- A surprising twist on cause and effect reveals how…
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Posted inBooks Mindfulness

In Zen, faith, doubt, and energy are all pleasingly natural, not supernatural

In my religious believing days, what happened during my morning reading time today would have struck me as a message from God. Or at least a message from the universe. Now, I simply view it as a coincidental message -- turning to three books and finding that continuing where I'd left off reading resulted in a similar point of view. Which, I suppose, isn't all that surprising, given that currently I only read books with a naturalistic perspective. I want to embrace reality as it is, not as someone imagines it to be. First I picked up James Ishmael Ford's,…
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Posted inGod Reality Science

I critique how my 50 year old self thought about God from my 77 year old perspective

Recently I wrote, Here I am, once again plugging my "Science, Spirit, and the Wisdom of Not-Knowing" essay. I noted that since I wrote that essay around 1998, when I was still a believer of the Eastern religion variety, my views have changed a lot since then. Now I'm an atheist, so, yeah, that's a big change from believing in the possibility of knowing God. The past few days I've been reading the 24-page essay, as it had been a long time since I'd done this. Today I finished reading it, so figured this was a good time to critique…
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Posted inBuddhism Spiritual practice/meditation

Buddhism’s fourth noble truth can be ignored, because there’s no need to follow a path of liberation

My previous post was "The first three of Buddhism's Four Noble Truths are obvious. The fourth is unappealing." True. But I should have made it more clear that in addition to being unappealing, the fourth truth also is unnecessary. That's why I said that Zen is more appealing than traditional Buddhism, because it doesn't buy into the whole Right View, Right Resolve, Right Speech, Right Conduct, Right Livelihood, Right Effort, Right Mindfulness, and Right Concentration stuff. Or at least nowhere near as assiduously as traditional Buddhism does. Since in that post I'd quoted James Ishmael Ford as saying that he's…
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Posted inBuddhism Spiritual practice/meditation

The first three of Buddhism’s Four Noble Truths are obvious. The fourth is unappealing.

Here's the blog post about James Ishmael Ford's book, Zen at the End of Religion: An Introduction for the Curious, the Skeptical, and the Spiritual But Not Religious, that got pre-empted by my detour into a recently discovered essay that I'd written more than 25 years ago. I like Ford's style. Warm. Informal. Non-dogmatic. You know, what I'd expect from a Zen practitioner. Early on he speaks about three forms of Zen that lie outside Buddhism. Jewish Zen and Christian Zen are two of them. They don't interest me. Then there's secular Zen, which is the Zen I resonate with most…
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Posted inReligions Science Spiritual practice/meditation

Here I am, once again plugging my “Science, Spirit, and the Wisdom of Not-Knowing” essay

Half an hour ago I was planning to write a blog post about a new book I've started to read, Zen at the End of Religion: An Introduction for the Curious, the Skeptical, and the Spiritual But Not Religious. I'd planned to talk about a few subjects in the initial chapters that caught my eye. This included a mention of Traditionalism -- a rather esoteric branch of spirituality that I briefly threw myself into after an editor of a Traditionalism journal asked me to write an essay for his publication around 25 years ago, maybe even earlier. I wanted to…
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Posted inReligions Science

Can you ever prove that something never happens? Sometimes. Pretty much.

I often like to say on this blog, and elsewhere, "Nothing is absolutely certain." That's why science, our best means of understanding reality, is never 100% certain about anything. That remaining bit of uncertainty, which could be as small as .0001%, or even less, allows for the possibility of error in any and all scientific theories. Which permits science to progress by replacing old flawed knowledge with new less-flawed knowledge. Since nothing is absolutely certain, obviously this applies to medical knowledge. Today I read a Reuters story in our local newspaper, "CDC site adopts anti-vaccine views." Here's a PDF file…
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Posted inReligions Science

Evolution, like other laws of nature, is logical and largely mathematical

As I said in the title of a blog post about a month ago, biologist Mark Vellend has a Provocative idea: there are only two branches of science, physics and evolution. His book, Everything Evolves: Why Evolution Explains More than We Think, from Proteins to Politics, is making good on that idea, now that I've been able to read about half of it. While Vellend is writing for a general audience, as well as scientists interested in looking at evolution through a broader lens than just biological evolution, which was Darwin's primary focus, his book still is fairly dense -- which…
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Posted inAwareness Neuroscience

“Myself” is a thought, just like other thoughts. Impermanent. Everchanging.

Most of us feel like sometimes, or often, we're at the mercy of thoughts. They arise when we don't want them to, like when we're trying to silence the mind in meditation. They fail to show up when we need them to, like when we're trying to remember where we put our reading glasses. But there's a basic assumption here that could be mistaken: that the "we" in the two sentences I just wrote isn't separable from "they" -- thoughts. This puts the problem of thoughts in a different perspective. Not as something that happens to us, but is us.…
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Posted inReality Religions Science

Maybe we humans are smart enough to ask ultimate questions, but not smart enough to answer them

Peter Zapffe was called "the bleakest philosopher of all time" in a Reddit post dealing with existentialism. That didn't make me eager to learn more about him. But I still wanted to, having come across several mentions of Zapffe in Robert Saltzman's book, Depending on no-thing. That title may sound depressing as well, but actually I feel energized when I read Saltzman's writings. While he rejects philosophical, metaphysical, and religious attempts to make life seem more appealing that it actually is, Saltzman's emphasis on direct experience of here and now is wonderfully simple. It's difficult, if not impossible, to question…
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Posted inBuddhism

As an atheist, this is what I like about Buddhism’s Pure Land Tradition

Surprisingly, even to me, I've enjoyed learning about the Pure Land Tradition of Buddhism after buying a book by Taitetsu Unno four years ago. From time to time I pick up River of Fire, River of Water, liking the parts that resonate with me, downplaying the parts that don't. As I said in a title of a blog post earlier this year, "I enjoy Buddhism's Pure Land tradition, but I don't believe in it." This is common among atheists like myself. It's possible to be moved by religious devotion without accepting the teachings of a religion. When I see a…
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Posted inFundamentalism Gay rights

Conversion therapy shows the danger of trying to be someone other than who you actually are

I don't believe that we humans have an enduring self, or soul. We're too changeable and impermanent for that to be true. However, each of us certainly is something unique, a person unlike any other on this planet. In other words, we possess an individuality without being an Individual -- the capital "I" pointing to an unfounded conception that there is some inner essence within each of us that, if not divine, is our True Self. Narrow-minded people who subscribe to this rigid outmoded view of humanity claim that (1) there are only two sexes, male and female; (2) at…
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