Ever eager to find profundity in anything connected with my dearly beloved iPhone 4, I took a look at a self-portrait I snapped yesterday -- using my phone's forward-facing camera held at arm's length -- and realized how much it...
I just got an email message from a friend about an attempt in Vienna, Austria to assassinate Gurinder Singh, the guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), which is headquartered in the Punjab, India. I was an active member of...
Over the years I've had many deep, as well as shallow, discussions with friends and acquaintances about free will. It's a fascinating subject, in no small part because substance and process are intimately related. Meaning, if someone disagrees with me...
Religions would have us strive for perfection. But as this essay points out, that would mean a death of sorts: no progressing, no changing. None of us is perfect. The question is, why would we want to be? (And a...
Some time ago I came across the "Killing the Buddha" web site and blog. Naturally I liked the name of the place. And I copied some links to pages that appealed to me at the time. Such as, "Ways I...
When I was a member of an India-based spiritual group, Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), the guru who led the organization frequently would say, "We need teachers in every aspect of life. Mysticism and spirituality are no different." Here's the...
When I was an active member of an India-based religious/mystical group, a word that inspired me was sat. It means "truth," and was used in many ways: satsangi (follower of truth), satguru (conveyor of truth), satsang (speaking of truth), and...
There's a lot of talk about self-realization in religious circles, mostly of the Eastern variety. The India-based spiritual group that I was a member of for many years promoted the idea, "self-realization before God-realization." In the West, self-realization has much...
Yesterday a regular visitor to this blog, tucson, left a comment on a post that deserved more attention than it likely was going to get. (Irritatingly, TypePad, my blog service, doesn't take a click on a "recent comments" link directly...
There's only one thing wrong with religious cosmologies: they aren't true. And that's a pretty damn serious thing. Which is why we shouldn't take erroneous views of the universe seriously. Yet we humans are meaning-creatures. Bare facts aren't enough for...
Hey, true believing religiously-minded visitors to this blog, it's time for a reminder, as unnecessary as this should be, given the name at the top of every page: Church of the Churchless. Get it? Churchless. That means not belonging to...
Oh, Jon, you failed me. My wife and I watch The Daily Show almost every night, and we enjoy your skewering of political, religious, and other varieties of pretentiousness. But last night your interview with Marilynne Robinson, author of "Absence...
For almost six years I've been asking true believers of various faiths if they can provide any demonstrable evidence that God exists. (Any "God," personal or impersonal, monistic or dualistic, I'm not particular.) Not surprisingly -- given the still ongoing...
I've never rank-ordered the major world religions on how appealing they are to me. Maybe I'll do that after finishing Stephen Prothero's "God is Not One," a book I've blogged about here and here. Prothero's clear descriptions of Islam, Christianity,...
The shortest, simplest, and likely most accurate answer to the question, "Why can't God be found?," is: because God doesn't exist. We also can't find unicorns, leprechauns, or the Tooth Fairy (hope my granddaughter isn't reading this post) for what...
Whenever I take one of those quizzes that tell you what religion/ philosophy melds best with your beliefs, pantheism always ends up close to the top. That makes sense. I've got a naturalistic view of the universe, but I also...
Sant Mat is a spiritual system historically centered in northern India, but which now has spread internationally, with initiates of various Sant Mat gurus scattered around the world. It often is billed as a "science of the soul" that transcends...
I don't get sick very often. So the past five days -- during which I've been suffering through a feverish flu/cold gifted to me by my three year old granddaughter, who, as you can see below, doesn't look capable of...
Often people say, "What's the harm if people believe in whatever religion they want to, no matter how weird it might seem to others?" Well, here's a good example of some harm: the June 21, 2010 cover of Newsweek. The...
"Be All You Can Be" was a longstanding slogan of the United States Army. I like it, though the big question is what that all consists of. (In part, clearly, a soldier.) Compared to the cosmos, "not much." I used...
I'm making my way through Stephen Prothero's "God is Not One," a book about how the eight major religions of the world are not at all the same -- much more like roads that head off in different directions than...
For a long time I've been fascinated by the fact that our universe is expanding because of the Big Bang that brought it into existence. I've visualized an edge to the universe, where a incomprehensibly vast tidal wave of raw...
A few days ago I was drawn to buy "God is Not One" by Stephen Prothero after seeing Stephen Colbert interview him in Colbert's always entertaining fashion. Prothero gives his take on the interview here, and you can watch it...
A few days ago I got an email from someone who thinks that I've become a guru. That struck me as a strange thing to say. After all, I'm not aware of anyone in the world who views me that...
Looking around, the universe seems to be flowingly interconnected, a seamless web of smoothly functioning laws of nature. Sure, there are lots of nasty things we humans find distasteful -- earthquakes, diseases, tornadoes, and such -- but even these have...
Many people mistakenly believe that modern science rules out the possibility of God, soul, spirit, and other supernatural entities. They think that scientists are only interested in the natural world -- this physical universe of space and time, plus everything...
If defenders of religious authority think gurus get insulted too much on this blog, take a look at Tim Minchin's "Pope Song," for comparison. The lyrics are profanely basic, but true.
After writing a couple of recent posts about boundless existence (see here and here), I've decided that it's time to reveal a truth that I've been reluctant to even tell myself. So let's learn it together: I'm enlightened. Ah, it...
As I said in my previous post about Milton Munitz' marvelous book, "Does Life Have a Meaning," the notion of boundless existence sends a chill up my churchless spine. This isn't really a "notion," though. Munitz makes clear that the...
As I said in this post, I used to have a love-hate thing going on with Ken Wilber and his Integral philosophy. (Click on that link and you'll be led to examples of what I liked and disliked.) Last night,...