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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Posted inChristianity/Jesus Fundamentalism

No surprise: Planned Parenthood shooter is a religious fanatic

I don't believe in ESP. But it didn't take any supernatural powers of perception for me, and many others, to accurately predict that the man who entered a Planned Parenthood clinic, killing three and wounding nine, was religiously motivated. A well-researched New York Times piece, "For Robert Dear, Religion and Rage Before Planned Parenthood Attack," describes Dear's religious sensibilities. Excerpts: He found excuses for his transgressions, she said, in his idiosyncratic views on Christian eschatology and the nature of salvation. “He claims to be a Christian and is extremely evangelistic, but does not follow the Bible in his actions,” Ms.…
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Posted inDeath/Rebirth Science

Physicist Sean Carroll debunks unscientific religious myth-making

My wife is a member of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, so we get the organization's excellent newsletter. On paper, even! I just got around to reading the August 2015 issue. It had an excellent piece by physicist Sean Carroll -- the address he gave after winning FFRF's "Emperor Has No Clothes Award."  You can read "Physicist Carroll: Atoms and Eve incompatible" on the FFRF web site. Or via this PDF file: Download Physicist Carroll: Atoms and Eve incompatible - Freedom From Religion Foundation Only the paper version had two interesting graphics. So I took photos of them to share…
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Posted inBuddhism Wu Project

In Buddhism, ultimate truth is an absence, not a presence

Yeah, I'm on an emptiness roll, Buddhism style. Three blog posts in a row on this fascinating subject (see here and here for #1 and #2). Having finished Guy Newland's "Introduction to Emptiness," I ordered a roughly similar Newland book, "Appearance & Reality." Both books are giving me new insights into what Buddhism is all about.  There's very little religious supernaturalism in them, a big reason why they appeal to me. I'm fine with philosophical Buddhism, which by and large is compatible with modern scientific understandings of reality. Once we get into rebirth, omniscience, and additional other-worldly stuff, though, I…
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Posted inBuddhism

Buddhism: the illusion of life is believing in a fixed reality

For many years -- decades, really -- I believed that the everyday world in which we live was an illusion. Meaning, there was an unseen truly real realm beyond the bounds of ordinary consciousness.  Changeable matter and mind weren't part of this ultimate reality. Only the eternal unchanging soul, our true self, was able to be aware of it.  Now, I understand that I had things completely backward. Such is how science comprehends the world. Also, Buddhism. As noted in my previous post, the Buddhist notion of "emptiness" is that nothing -- including us, and even emptiness itself -- has…
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Posted inBuddhism

Emptiness is ultimate reality: nothing, including us, has an intrinsic nature

I run hot and cold about Buddhism, depending on what sort of Buddhist writing I'm reading. Religious Buddhism turns me off, but I like philosophical Buddhism that doesn't fall prey to unfounded supernaturalism.  Recently I've been re-reading Guy Newland's "Introduction to Emptiness." It's a clear and persuasive description of the core notion in Mahayana Buddhism, emptiness.  In the first few pages of his book, Newland explains what emptiness is all about. First, he speaks of the suffering that arises because we wrongly believe that we are something we're not. We suffer unnecessarily because we do not know ourselves. Like addicts…
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Posted inFundamentalism

“Imagine” is the solace I needed today

After hearing about today's attacks in Paris, I considered writing a blog post about religious fundamentalism. But then I realized that John Lennon had already said everything I wanted to say. And in a much better way.------------------------------- Imagine Imagine there's no heavenIt's easy if you tryNo hell below usAbove us only skyImagine all the peopleLiving for today... Imagine there's no countriesIt isn't hard to doNothing to kill or die forAnd no religion tooImagine all the peopleLiving life in peace... You may say I'm a dreamerBut I'm not the only oneI hope someday you'll join usAnd the world will be as one…
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Posted inBuddhism Reality

Asked to say something about love, I’m pretty much speechless

Yesterday I got an email message: Dear Mr. Hines , Your blog is very honest and nothing is more beautiful save love itself. Please tell us more about self-less and mutual love  and your views on the subject. Sincerely, __________ Reading those words, I realized that I haven't written much explicitly about love during the eleven years this blog has existed. This will be post # 2,140. When I used the search box in the right sidebar to see what popped up when I put in "love," almost all of the Google results for my two blogs were on my more…
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Posted inScience

Beauty is enhanced by science, not diminished

Here's a great video of physicist Richard Feynman speaking about science and beauty, combined with some gorgeous images.  Feynman makes some excellent points.  I've never understood why some wrongly believe that scientists, and the scientifically-minded (I include myself in this group), don't appreciate the beauty in life as much as other people do.  Feynman points out that scientists look upon the world in the same way as everybody else. But they also have a deeper factual understanding of certain aspects of reality. This enhances, rather than diminishes, the scientific appreciation of beauty.
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Posted inDeath/Rebirth

Death is scary. How we deal with the fear… often even scarier.

I've got no problem admitting that I'm afraid of dying. I've grappled with a primal fear of nonexistence. I've asked our attorney, when drawing up our wills (or living trusts) to substitute the word "gerbils" for "dies" when speaking about me, as in When Brian gerbils, his possessions will go to...  But my fear of death has moderated quite a bit as I've grown older. (I'm 67 now.) I'm still more than a little interested in the subject of death, though. So when I heard about a book called "The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in…
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