2007: Looking for God and Finding Truth

2007 finally comes to a close and so also does an important chapter in my life. It was a year of loss and miracles.
It was, in no uncertain melodramatic terms, my 'dark night of the soul' in which I struggled through personal tragedy and desolation. Spiritually uncommitted, with a luke-warm interest in buddhism, and a highly skeptical view of religion in general, I nevertheless found myself regressing into an infantile egocentrism, appealing for help to the ultimate parent surrogate called God.

And much to my surprise, God answered my entreaties on March 20 at 20:50 in my kitchen. I had my first 'God Experience,' otherwise known as religious ecstasy; it lasted a good 40 minutes during which time I felt I had merged with an infinite loving presence. Was this the God of the Bible? Was this Nirvana, or the infinite timeless cosmos revealed?

It was by far, the most staggering experience of my whole life. But was it really what I subjectively interpreted it to be? This question was to occupy a great deal of my time over the following months. I visited a psychologist and then a psychiatrist to be sure that I had not had a psychotic episode of some sort. I was persuaded that I had had a genuine religious experience and that my sanity was intact.

So then I sought spiritual advice.

First, from the Christians. The psychiatrist put me in touch with a well-meaning Baptist Pastor who reassured me that I had had an authentic encounter with God. However, I couldn't find a way to accept the irrationality and magical thinking of the Bible ... and the God of the Old Testament is really mean! Combine that with the anti-gay stance of the Baptist Church and the Pastor had an overwhelmingly hard-sell to make.

Next came the New Agers: the psychologist referred me to a Shaman who offered to guide me on my spiritual journey. Her credentials in shamanic voyaging consist of having studied under a Kundalini expert known as Jyoti whose website describes her as 'a flame of divine grace which can shed a large tear of love.' Is that a mixed metaphor? At the conclusion of our meeting she gave me a copy of the DVD 'What the Bleep Do We Know,' a pseudo-scientific documentary produced by the Ramtha School of Enlightenment. It proved to be a hilarious romp through quantum mystical flapdoodlery. I guess my kundalini isn't rising high enough yet! I found it totally absurd.

Finally, the Buddhists: my psychotherapist offered her own interpretation of my religious experience, despite the fact that by this time I already suspected it to be a neurologically induced illusion. She explained away the God part of the experience as a cultural projection; it was, in fact, a manifestation of Buddhist Enlightenment, the goal of Buddhist practice.

So it went. Despite the kindness of everyone I turned to, no-one offered or listened to my attempts to find an explanation based upon scientific objectivity.

Where are the facts, if any, to be found about the 'God Experience'?

The primary descriptive text appears to be The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James from the turn of the 20th Century. More to the point however, I discovered the analytical works of neuropsychologist V.S. Ramachandran, philosopher Daniel C. Dennett's works, Breaking the Spell and Consciousness Explained, Michael Shermer's How We Believe, Susan Blackmore's The Meme Machine, Richard Dawkin's The God Delusion and the research of Michael Persinger, as outlined in Neuropsychological Bases of God Beliefs. In addition, I discussed my experience with science journalist and author John Horgan and discovered that I am not particularly unique; he explained that many atheists have had God Experiences. His one wry comment was that they usually didn't remain atheists afterwards; I was unusual only in my not being converted! The scientific perspectives just made more sense to me than any religious explanation.


It was extremely interesting to read in Persinger's book that

Either by design or by consequence, proponents of most religious organizations realize that few people will indict their own experiences. To challenge or doubt one's own experience is to doubt one's concept of self. The anxiety and uncertainty are just too intense.
Religious organizations feed on this tendency by asking the person to judge for himself or herself. Although it presents the guise of free choice, the request is clearly lopsided before it is asked. Few people are going to say, "God talked to me but there is also a statistical likelihood that it was a quirk of my brain."

I was lucky enough that in my search for truth I was able to both doubt my subjective experience and maintain an intact sense of self. Through the application of reason I was able to evaluate my 'God Experience' for the natural neuropsychological phenomenon that it was.

However I can't help but sometimes feel regret and sadness. Oh, the comfort of knowing that there really was a God that loved me, that I was not alone, that I needn't fear death - it was a wonderful dream. But reason also brings its own comforts, cool as they may feel at times.

One more loss and one more gain to add to the list for 2007 - to paraphrase John Horgan's words - I've given up trying to find my religion.

As Alice in Wonderland said: I just can't believe impossible things.
The White Queen's response to Alice is so fitting to the reactions I have received to my descriptions of my God Experience: 'Why, sometimes I've believed six impossible things before breakfast!'

All the best to you in 2008.

And thanks to the people mentioned above who were very kind, personally accompanying me on my search for truth, despite their probable disappointments at my being unable to embrace their spiritual paradigms.

The End Timers Doomsday Beliefs

The Christian End-Times Doomsday Beliefs
Michael Shermer, in his book How We Believe,2000, describes the recycling of messiah myths throughout the disparate cultures and ages of human history as a response to the suffering of human existence. When social conditions include oppression of a people, there is a good chance that the response will be the belief in a rescuing messiah delivering redemption.
In this Channel 4 Documentary Tony Robinson presents evidence from America, the Middle East, the Mediterranean and Africa about Christian beliefs in the prophecies contained within the Book of Revelation. He interviews people who believe millions will be spirited up to Heaven, Israel will fight a nuclear war, that the Secretary General of the UN will be unmasked as the Anti-Christ and the world will end after the Battle of Armageddon.

There appear to be two camps of end-time believers: the premillenialists, and the postmillenialists, both dangerous in my view.

The premillenialists believe that the only mechanism for change is through the destruction that will be wrought by the apocalypse. In an unusual alliance, evangelical Christians are supporting Israeli settlement expansion and the rebuilding of the Temple on the Mount in Jerusalem in order to bring about war between Islam and Judaism. The ensuing bloody conflict will be in accordance with biblical prophesy and thereby ensure the second coming of Christ. Exhausting the earth's resources also serves to hasten the end-times.

The postmillenialists, in contrast, believe that the second coming of Christ will occur only when God's kingdom has been established on earth. This means that the entire human race must be converted to Christianity and secularism in government eliminated. As a consequence they are promoting an aggressive global evangelization. Bibles come before food and other aid for underdeveloped nations. There already exists in America a powerful Dominionist, Theocratic Christian Reconstructionist Movement that reaches into the highest levels of government. The White House frequently consults with the Religious Right on both domestic and foreign policy issues. George Bush has placed more than 150 graduates of Pat Robertson's School of Law into high ranking position in his administration. (For those of you that don't know, Christian Televangelist Pat Robertson's Law School is one of the lowest ranked law schools in the entire country!) In its most extreme forms, Dominionism, as proposed by R.J. Rushdooney, will institute Mosaic law in the United States. Only Christians will be allowed as citizens; adulterers, fornicators and homosexuals will be stoned to death.

Are our times so full of existential angst that these beliefs are flourishing? Are the threats of terrorism, environmental degradation, species loss, depletion of non-renewable energy sources, climate change or over-population fueling our fears?
These are questions that, unfortunately, this documentary does not answer.

The Doomsday Code: 2012

Millennialism, in both its religious and secular forms, is an eschatological belief. The defining feature of end-time beliefs is the apocalyptic destruction of evil, followed by an era of righteousness. The scenario may include supernatural agents such as God, natural forces, or even economic forces, as described in the theory of Marxism, in which capitalism must be overthrown through violent revolution.

Michael Shermer in his book How We Believe, 2000, proposes an explanation for why these myths are so universal. As human beings we are both pattern-seeking animals, and storytelling animals. Pattern-seeking can lead us to discover truths, but also to make false conclusions about causality - relational causality otherwise known as magical thinking; storytelling is the powerful tool by which we describe the patterns we find, and unlike scientific explanation, it is innate and compelling. Through this powerful combination we express our dissatisfaction with the status quo and our deepest desires for foundational change.

For the millenialists, now that both the years 1000 and 2000 have passed, the new date for doomsday has been moved to 2012. This documentary describes prophesies, both ancient and contemporary, that support the establishment of this new date.
You may, as I certainly do, find the different claims to be absurd, but nevertheless they speak to our shared human nature.

Finally, I'll throw in my own worthless two cents on the issue. Al Gore, in his Nobel prize acceptance speech last week, described a new study done by the US Navy. In it they say that the Arctic ice-cap is disappearing much faster than previously believed. In fact they state that it will disappear within the next seven years ... Global warming is one doomsday prediction, based on rational scientific inquiry, that we may still be able to do something to prevent. Unlike the end-time eschatologies, redemption is possible only by acting to prevent the apocalypse in the first place.

Part One






Part Two

Don't Free Tibet!

Today I saw a 'Free Tibet' bumper sticker. Free Tibet for what? A return to religious tyranny and despotism whereby 90% of the population were subjected to slavery or serfdom, coerced by the threat of mutilation, amputation and torture by buddhist priests?

Gelder and Gelder in their book, The Timely Rain, quote a chilling interview with a former Tibetan serf, Tsereh Wang Tuei, who, having stolen two sheep from a monastery had both his eyes gouged out and his hand mutilated, upon the orders of the holy lama. The Dalai Lama may have marketed himself very successfully to the West as the spiritual leader of a religion of kindness, but the historical record shows that Tibetan Buddhist theocracy is far from kind and compassionate. The Tibetan people were oppressed and abused by their priestly government.

If the history of mankind has shown anything, it is that separation of religious belief from government safeguards the rights of people, be it from the religion of Yahweh, Christ, Mohammed or Buddha.
Although far from perfect, under communism slavery and serfdom were abolished, along with the crushing taxes and vile forms of physical punishment exacted by the monasteries. Land owned by the lamas was distributed to the peasants. The first hospitals were built and a system of secular education for all was instituted. Claims made by the Dalai Lama and his brother Tendzin Choegyal that "more than 1.2 million Tibetans are dead as a result of the Chinese occupation" are unsupported by the evidence. The 1953 census showed the entire population of Tibet to be only 1,274,000.
Michael Parenti, in Friendly Feudalism: The Tibetan Myth, 2003, writes

If the Chinese killed 1.2 million in the early 1960s then whole cities and huge portions of the countryside, indeed almost all of Tibet, would have been depopulated, transformed into a killing field dotted with death camps and mass graves -- of which we have seen no evidence. The Chinese military force in Tibet was not big enough to round up, hunt down, and exterminate that many people even if it had spent all its time doing nothing else.

The Tibetan people may yearn for liberation from the Chinese communist government, and for a return of their religious leader, but I doubt if they long for a return to the feudal, fascist, sexist, occultic cruelty that Tibetan Buddhism represents.

The Washington Post in 1999 reported

Many Tibetan farmers, for example, have no interest in surrendering the land they gained during China's land reform. Tibet's former slaves say they, too, don't want their former masters to return to power."I've already lived that life once before," said Wangchuk, a 67-year-old former slave who was wearing his best clothes for his yearly pilgrimage to Shigatse, one of the holiest sites of Tibetan Buddhism. He said he worshipped the Dalai Lama, but added, "I may not be free under Chinese communism, but I am better off than when I was a slave."

Underneath the veneer of the Dalai Lama's benign smile is an aggressive political agenda. The Dalai's brother, Gyalo Thindrup, attempted to bring all Tibetan sects under the Dalai's control, using force whenever necessary. Opposition leader Gungthang Tsultrim, representative of 14 of the Tibetan settlements in exile, was shot to death, and the murderer is said to have received 300,000 rupees from the Dalai Lama's government-in-exile for his services.

The Dalai is guided by a Tibetan Buddhist eschatology - an end times belief - every bit as violent and as intolerant as the Christian vision of the Apocalypse, except, of course, that Tibetan Buddhism rises in the East and conquers the evil forces of the West, under the banner of Shambhala, to impose its dominionist vision on the world. To a western audience he downplays this as mere metaphor, to his Tibetan adherents he means it quite literally.

I'll be posting more on the Dalai. Someone needs to counterbalance the sycophantic public relations machinery he so skillfully manipulates. It's a shame that the Chinese government has not yet achieved the required level of sophistication to inform and educate the starry-eyed Western media about the realities of Tibetan political history.

Links:
Michael Parenti, Friendly Feudalism: The Tibetan Myth, 2003

Ken Wilber and the Q-Link pendant

This target was too easy to ignore! Having criticized aspects of Ken Wilber's 'philosophy' in a previous post about CAM I thought I should tackle some of the practical manifestations of his belief system.

He has been actively endorsing the Q-Link, the sole product of the manufacturer Clarus, Inc. They describe it as

a sleek pendant that tunes your being for optimal living: More energy, less stress, greater focus, and enhanced well being. No matter what you do, the Q-Link simply helps you feel better and gives you a creative edge by helping to harmonize your mind and body.

Small wonder that Wilber is so enthusiastic in his endorsements of Q-Link; he is closely involved with the company, and believes that its 'innovations' are a direct consequence of his 'Theory of Everything.'

The Clarus website features a motion-graphic introduction with the following narrative:

Clarus Transphase Scientific discovers frequencies found in nature, applies them through technology to enhance and clarify the linkage between physical and non-physical domains.
Greater human potential is realized. Sympathetic Resonance Technology (TM). Born from nature, harnessed by science, ready for us.

Sympathetic Resonance Technology (TM) is described as a discovery which

clarifies the fundamental information pathways between physical matter, linking it to its conjunct non-hertzian field.

What, you may well ask, is a non-hertzian field? The web site goes on to explain:

Everything physical has a fundamental field of non-hertzian energy made up of energetic vortices. In living systems this field is called the Biofield, a term coined by the US National Institute of Health (NIH) in 1995. This "non-physical" field that surrounds and permeates every cell represents a new frontier for science and humanity.

Now, that is very re-assuring, the National Institute of Health is a reputable governmental agency. If they refer to biofields then it must be true! Or? When you check the NIH website page on Energy Medicine they describe biofields as putative (as opposed to veritable) and are undetectable. Further, they state that the health claims made regarding biofields

are the most controversial of CAM practices because neither the external energy fields nor their therapeutic effects have been demonstrated convincingly by any biophysical means.

If that isn't enough to convince you that the Q-Link is nothing but a marketing scam lurking behind a thinly veiled facade of pseudo-science then review how a group of electronic geeks examined the Q-Link. Ben Goodacre of the Guardian writes:

We chucked probes at it, and tried to detect any “frequencies” emitted, with no joy. And then we did what any proper dork does when presented with an interesting device: we broke it open. Drilling down, the first thing we came to was the circuit board. This, we noted with some amusement, was not in any sense connected to the copper coil, and therefore is not powered by it.

The eight copper pads do have some intriguing looking circuit board tracks coming out of them, but they too, on close inspection, are connected to absolutely nothing. A gracious term to describe their purpose might be “decorative”. I’m also not clear if I can call something a “circuit board” when there is no “circuit”.

Finally, there is a modern surface mount electronic component soldered to the centre of the device. It looks impressive, but whatever it is, it is connected to absolutely nothing. Close examination with a magnifying glass, and experiments with a multimeter and oscilloscope, revealed that this component on the “circuit board” is a zero-ohm resistor.

This is simply a resistor that has pretty much no resistance: in effect a bit of wire in a tiny box. It might sound like an absurd component, but they’re quite common in modern circuits, because they can be used to bridge the gap between adjacent tracks on a circuit board with a standard-size component.

And that’s it. No microchip. A coil connected to nothing. And a zero-ohm resistor, which costs half a penny, and is connected to nothing.

Which for me kind of describes Ken Wilber - connected to nothing, except perhaps his enormous ego and bank account.

Links
Energy medicine: An Overview
NIH NCCAM website
The Amazing QLink Science Pendant
The Guardian May 19, 2007
Clarus Transphase Scientific
Q-Link manufacturer

'Integral' Medicine or Quackery?

In January of 2006, I made the acquaintance of a Dr. Adriane-Bettina Kobusch, a quiet-spoken and genuinely intelligent high school teacher at the Oberstufenkolleg in Bielefeld, Germany where she teaches Gesundheitwissenschaft - health sciences to 11th-12th grade/sixth form students. Originally qualified in the science of pharmacology and in public health, she developed an interest in Buddhism, contemplative psychology and traditional chinese medicine (TCM). In addition to teaching, she was, at the time of our meeting, in the process of obtaining a license to practise 'complementary' or 'alternative' medicine.

Wishing to share her enthusiasm for this subject she presented me with a book of essays entitled Consciousness and Healing - Integral approaches to Mind-Body Medicine, Ed. M. Schlitz, T. Amorok and M. S. Micozzi, 2005, Elsevier.

She requested that I read the foreword to the book so that I could at least understand the basics of her interests. It was my first encounter with New Age pseudo-philosopher and founder of the Integral Institute, Ken Wilber, and it was also the beginning of my realization that the Age of Reason had been displaced by the bankruptcy of postmodern relativism. I was shocked at what I read:

...when it comes to deciding which approaches, methodologies, epistemologies, or ways of knowing are "correct," the answer can only be, "All of them." That is, all of the numerous practices or paradigms of human inquiry--including...hermeneutics, meditation, vision quest, phenomenology, structuralism, subtle energy research, shamanic voyaging, chaos theory...All of these modes of inquiry have an important piece of the overall puzzle of a total existence that includes, among other things, health and illness, doctors and patients, and sickness and healing.

Basically, Wilber claims indiscriminately that everything is true - as long as it fits his particular view of reality; for example, Intelligent Design and Michael Behe are in; Charles Darwin and the Theory of Evolution are definitely out!

He goes on to say that

Nobody is smart enough to be wrong all the time... hundreds of thousands of decent men and women around the world are already practicing [some form of alternative medicine.] For the most part they are responsible, sincere, and concerned men and women of integrity, and they honestly believe that the practice of their chosen field is making a positive and helpful contribution to humanity. I believe them. And I hope you do too.

With an unbelievable dose of hubris Wilber then states that he has formulated the mother of all ontologies. Arthur Koestler's concept of holons are diagrammed by Wilber into a four quadrant map that supposedly includes and interconnects everything hierarchically into his infallible understanding of the Kosmos.

He claims that modern medicine is lacking because it fails to embrace the potential to be found in all four of his quadrants, and by not doing so

some sort of rupture has occurred somewhere. Both practitioners and their patients can feel it, can feel this fracture in the Kosmos called "going to the doctor."

I don't mean to sound trite, but really, whenever I go to the doctor I feel relief and gratitude for their help! Wilber claims his ontological system to be the essential integral framework for uniting and justifying the grab-bag of complementary and alternative medical (CAM) treatments described in the collection of essays that comprise the rest of the book. I will be turning a skeptical eye on some of these claims in future posts.

Amusingly, Wilber describes himself as being particularly in favor of subtle energy medicine; the National Institute of Health describes it as

the most controversial of CAM practices because neither the external energy fields nor their therapeutic effects have been demonstrated convincingly by any biophysical means.

His enthusiasm is no doubt financially related to his marketing of a pseudo-scientific device known as the Q-link pendant that claims to recharge your 'biofield' ... and I'll be covering that absurdity in a future posting also.

My aversion to Ken Wilber is probably by now quite clear! But what disturbed me the most when reading this book was the dissonance it created when I realized that intelligent people were embracing pseudo-science, against all the evidence, because of their religious beliefs, no matter how well-meaning their intentions.

I find it astonishing that an intellectually advanced nation such as Germany actually acknowledges and thereby legitimizes the various forms of medical quackery known as CAM. However, I hope that by their official licensure of these practitioners some measure of control can be exercised over the potential excesses and dangers that CAM poses to the general public.

In the name of real science, practice real medicine so you can really help people.

Links:
Jeff Meyerhoff, Bald Ambition - a rigorous critique of Wilber's Theory of Everything
Gregory Falk, Norman Einstein: The Dis-Integration of Ken Wilber - an evaluation of Ken Wilber and the Integral Institute as a cult phenomena.
Quack Watch - a guide to Quackery, Health Fraud, and Intelligent Decisions
The Scientific Review of Alternate Medicine
The Scientific Review of Mental Health Practice

From Age of Reason to New Age

As an architecture student I became acquainted with the architectural works of Thomas Jefferson, and from this encounter I developed a deep enthusiasm for this American icon and for his achievements as America's pre-eminent 'Gentleman Architect' and free-thinker.

When the writers, philosophers and scientists of Jefferson's time referred to their activities as the "Enlightenment," they believed that they were breaking from the past and replacing the obscurity, darkness, and ignorance of European thought with the "light" of truth. By the eighteenth century the philosophe movement had fully articulated the values of the European Enlightenment with theories that would dramatically change the face of European society and lead to the creation of new governments in both America and France.

My complacency in the belief of the triumph of reason blinded me over the years to the decay that has been occurring in the standards by which we measure knowledge and truth. We apparently live in a New Age of undifferentiated pluralism where all beliefs and opinions are equally valid, where the 'fashionable nonsense' of postmodernism claims science to be nothing more than a socially constructed myth.

I am disappointed, I am angry and I'm not going to take it anymore!
Therefore I am starting this blog. I intend to disseminate as much information and healthy skepticism as I can to counter the irrationalism of New Age pseudo-science, pseudo-philosophy and cults. And I'll be taking a few swipes at the more traditional forms of irrationality while I'm at it!