Posted inScience Spiritual practice/meditation

“Higher” states of consciousness actually are lower

I was turned on to an intriguing TEDx talk by neuroscientist Arne Dietrich about Surfing the Stream of Consciousness by a reader of this blog. His description of the core theme of the 17 minute video starts at about the 13 minute mark, if you want to get the gist in only four minutes.   A blog post on The Peaceful Self site, "Flying With the Pixies," includes a transcript of part of Dietrich's talk.  "Your mind, your soul, your hopes, your dreams, your emotions is about a cantaloupe size of meat crackling with electricity inside your skull. There's nothing sacrosanct…
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Posted inReality

Deal with these scientific facts, religious believers

I'm a proud believer in reality. That's my god, now that I've deconverted from religious belief: natural reality.  Science is the best, and arguably the only, way we humans have of knowing solid facts about the universe, which is the only natural reality available to us. One of the reasons I'm enjoying re-reading "The Atheist's Guide to Reality" (by Alex Rosenberg) so much is that Rosenberg -- though a philosophy professor -- has a solid background in science.  His philosophical conclusions don't come out of thin air. They're grounded in fundamental understandings of modern science.  Below are some of those…
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Posted inReality Science

“The Atheist’s Guide to Reality” — a mind blowing book

I like books that take some of my cherished assumptions about how the world works and chew them up into tiny pieces before putting them in a Truth Blender where they're dissolved into unrecognizable thought-mush. "The Atheist's Guide to Reality" by Alex Rosenberg is such a book. After reading it four years ago (I blogged about it here, here, and here) I've finished re-reading the second half of the book.  And, yes, once again it has blown my mind. But in a different way from the first time, because I'm a different person now.  Being a habitual highlighter and back-of-book…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories Religions

The joy of deconverting from religious belief

Given how easily religious believers can accept the existence of a god they've never directly experienced, I always find it surprising when they can't accept a much more believable hypothesis: Giving up religiosity brings more happiness and contentment, not less. This is what's happened to me, though I readily admit that comparing states of happiness at various times of one's life is very difficult to do. After all, it isn't as if we can lay them side by side and measure how much contentment they contain. I was happy as an atheist. I was happy as a religious believer. I'm…
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Posted inGod Politics

No, Ammon Bundy, that voice in your head isn’t God

Religious craziness is a form of socially-acceptable insanity. Case in point: Ammon Bundy is one of the militants who have taken over buildings at the federal Malheur Wildlife Refuge in eastern Oregon.  Here's a short 90-second excerpt from a longer video Bundy made where he talks about what led him to try to help Dwight and Steven Hammond, ranchers in Harney County who were convicted on arson charges when they burned rangeland illegally -- endangering hunters and firefighters.   Somehow Bundy believes that when he needed to clear his mind about what to do, it was the Lord who did…
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Posted inGod

Sure, an atheist can believe in God. Here’s how.

I'm an atheist who believes in God. This isn't illogical. Or a contradiction. I just define "God" differently than religious believers do. Which is pretty much how Paul Harrison does in his book, "Elements of Pantheism: A Spirituality of Nature and the Universe." The word Pantheism derives from the Greek words pan (="all") and theos (="God"). Literally, Pantheism means: All is God. In essence Pantheism holds that the universe as a whole is worthy of the deepest reverence, and that only the Universe and Nature are worthy of that degree of reverence.  The statement "Nature is my god" is perhaps…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories Spiritual practice/meditation

Advice about marijuana “paranoia” from an ex-hippie pothead

In case you're wondering... sure, this post does indeed belong on this here Church of the Churchless. After all, I've written at some length about why "Marijuana is my secular sacrament." Excerpt: I’m grateful to Mother Nature for bringing forth a substance that elevates the spirit. There’s a reason we speak of getting high. Cannabis has a way of making my usual worries and anxieties appear much smaller, as if I were standing on top of a mountain, looking at them from a distance rather than close-up. At the same time, I don’t feel like I’ve lost touch with reality. Rather,…
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Posted inBooks Religions

Worst and best part of being human: imagining what doesn’t exist

Imagination is wonderful. Except when it isn't.  That's one of the core messages of psychologist Daniel Gilbert's marvelous book, "Stumbling on Happiness."  I'm re-reading the book after first discovering it in 2006, when I wrote "Happiness is a new mountain bike. Maybe." On the same day I bought myself this present, I received a few other gifts from myself after a visit to my other favorite Sisters store, Paulina Springs Books. I saw “Stumbling on Happiness” by Daniel Gilbert on the new non-fiction table. At first I figured that the book would tell me how to do just that. But…
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Posted inChristianity/Jesus Mystics Radha Soami Satsang Beas

A Sant Mat follower returns to Jesus (and wants to hear from others who have done this)

Here's a message I got from someone who tried to follow both Sant Mat and Christianity. After developing doubts about the Science of Spirituality branch of Sant Mat (led by guru Rajinder Singh), she returned to her faith in Jesus. Below the woman says, "If anyone has any information about Science of the Soul that is not commonly known or discussed, I would be interested in hearing their stories. Especially from those that have chosen to leave the path for Christianity." Even if this doesn't describe you, the woman is interested in comments -- whether positive or negative -- from…
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Posted inFundamentalism

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s absurd radical Islamist theology

By their very nature, all religious theologies based on irrational supernaturalism don't make sense. But some theologies are more non-sensical than others -- particularly destructive ones which call for violence and killing in the name of God. Like that preached by the head of ISIS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. He was on TIME magazine's Shortlist for 2015 Person of the Year, losing out to Angela Merkel. In the Person of the Year issue, al-Baghdadi got a two-page writeup.  The Quran, Islam's holy book, was a big part of his life from an early age. Born into a religiously devout lower-middle-class Sunni Muslim…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories

Profound philosophical implications of our 2015 Christmas letter

Sure, it may look like just a Christmas letter, but our "2015 Holiday Greetings from Laurel and Brian" has a lot of deep philosophy beneath the surface. I'll share the Christmas letter below. A central theme is... Who knows? Who can tell? What's good or bad? How do we decide?  Well, at least I think that's a central theme. The Christmas letter I wrote is so profound beneath the obvious surface, that it defies even my attempts to comprehend the depths of its philosophical meaning. All I know is that when I read the final chapter in Jamie Holmes' book,…
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Posted inSpiritual practice/meditation

Live happy and healthy — die soon anyway

A Mark Morford piece, "Study: Live happy and healthy and die soon anyway," appeals to my basic cranky old man sense of WTF. Sure, I'm happy most of the time. Especially when I'm complaining about something. Which includes religion.  But I don't enjoy feeling that happiness is a must, that if I'm not happy bad things are going to happen to me. (Aside from being unhappy, of course.) This is, though, how in the past I've looked upon supposed scientific findings that a positive outlook is good for your health. And, if one believes in religiosity, for your soul. Thankfully, according…
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Posted inMiscellaneous

Same blog, new look

Hey, it's almost the end of 2015. New Year's is coming. Seemed like a good time to try out a new look for Church of the Churchless. I've been wanting a design that was mobile friendly, since lots of people nowadays read blogs and such on their smart phones, tablets, and such. I deleted a bunch of extraneous content, which makes for a cleaner look in my utterly personal opinion. I'll probably make some adjustments to the design, but it seems appealing to me. 
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Posted inMiracles

Diogenes the Cynic: there’s no such thing as miracles

I've started to read a book by Tim Whitmarsh, "Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World." Its central theme is stated in the introduction. We are still, in the twenty-first century, grappling with issues that are at least two and a half millennia old... Disbelief in the supernatural is as old as the hills. ...Too often religious practice is imagined to be the regular state of affairs, needing no explanation, whereas any kind of deviation is seen as weird and remarkable.  This view underpins the modernist mythology: the post-Enlightenment West is seen as exceptional, completely unlike anything else that…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas

Horrible: Guru Gurinder Singh opposed to abortion after a rape

Here in the United States, only the most extreme opponents of abortion (which is legal in this country) want to prevent women who have been raped, and get pregnant with the rapist's child, from terminating the pregnancy. So I was shocked when someone emailed me the message below. She describes a satsang (public talk) given by an Indian guru, Gurinder Singh, last summer. The guru took a hard line with a woman who asked if a woman who had been raped should have the child. I used to be a member of the religious/spiritual organization, Radha Soami Satsang Beas, the…
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Posted inReality Science

Neuroscientist David Eagleman: the brain creates our reality

Somehow my wife and I missed most of the original showing of the 6-part PBS series, "The Brain - With David Eagleman." We saw the final episode, and wanted to catch up on the rest. So last night we streamed What is Reality?, the first episode. It's available on iTunes and Amazon Prime, with clips on the PBS web site. Here's one of the clips: Really interesting. The basic neuroscientific message of this episode is that reality doesn't directly stream into consciousness through our senses, or by any other means. Instead, the brain does all sorts of processing of raw…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories Reality

On a bike ride, I embrace natural reality and ignore a manmade rule

Philosophically-inclined guy that I am, I can find profound meanings in just about any everyday experience. Today I rode my Streetstrider outdoor elliptical bike at Salem's Minto Brown Island Park during a (partial) break in the heavy rains that have been hitting the Pacific Northwest all week. I'm a big believer in the adage I expressed in a 2009 blog post, "There are no rules (including this one)." Now, there are no rules points back at itself. Meaning, there are no rules. Unless you want to follow a rule. Feel free. There's no rule that says "never follow a rule." We all do…
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Posted inReality

Does Santa Claus exist? Depends on the nature of belief.

With Christmas coming in a few weeks, it seemed just the right time to read a book by Eric Kaplan called "Does Santa Exist? A Philosophical Investigation." Now, I'm not quite done with the book, and I also don't want to give away what I suspect Kaplan's ending will be. So I'll focus on the existence of Santa Claus in another post. Here I'll zero in on a thought-provoking thought experiment about beliefs and reality that Kaplan throws out in the introductory chapter. It's a good example of what I like most about the book: a pleasing blend of quirky…
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Posted inScience

Max Tegmark: “Consciousness is the way information feels”

I felt unsatisfied after reading Margaret Wertheim's "I feel therefore I am: How exactly did consciousness become a problem?"  Wertheim, a talented science writer, ably reviewed philosophical and scientific conceptions of consciousness. But she ended up favoring a mysterian view where subjectivity supposedly is just too different from physical matter to have consciousness explained by particles. This is all thrilling science, yet a question remains: will any of it explain subjective experience?  Chalmers, the philosopher, claims that the problem of experience is not mechanistically reducible and he argues that it will ‘persist even when the performance of all the relevant functions is explained’.…
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