Tag Archives: religion

We are ONE

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One of my favourite ancient texts is the Tao Te Ching. In it ‘The Way’ cannot be named, because to name it is to separate it from itself, to identify a part rather than the whole.

Jesus said, “God’s kingdom is coming, but not in a way that you will be able to see with your eyes. People will not say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or, ‘There it is!’ because God’s kingdom is within you.”

Rumi said, “You are not a drop in the ocean, you are the entire ocean in a drop.”

The ancients understood the interconnectedness of everything.

I think the best metaphor for this is also the scientific equivalent… everything in the universe is a wave. Do you want to know something really interesting about a wave? Move deeper in, away from the turbulent shore of an ocean and watch a wave approaching you. The water doesn’t travel with the wave. The wave travels, but the water itself only ebbs and flows, rises and falls. The water molecules at the tip of a wave 30 feet away from you don’t reach you when the wave does, it essentially stays 30 feet away from you as the wave travels your way. The wave is ‘one’ with the ocean.

This interconnectedness is everywhere, and we are learning more and more about these connections. Some things we’ve known for a very long time because they are easily observable, like how women who live together will have their menstrual cycle synchronize. Some things are more recently discovered, like how trees will communicate and share food through mycelium, even across species to keep the forest strong. We are all connected. Life is all connected.

And yet humans fight over things that divide us. Things like borders, religion, politics, social status, and ideology. We choose not to see connections, but differences. We choose to ignore the messages in our ancient texts, and find reasons to ‘other’ those that are not like us.

We rather get lost in turbulence than recognize we are all part of the same ocean, all riding the ebb and flow of the same wave.

“Those who are right do not argue. Those who argue are not right.” ~Tao Te Ching

What will it take to recognize that we are all one… and that the arguing needs to stop?

Keeping the faith

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Religions around the world are losing followers. But people are seekers, they want to believe in something. And while there are downsides to religion, including fanaticism and blind following of misguided faith leaders, there is also a warmth of community, a comfort of shared values, and a wonderful sense of belonging.

Atheism and often the path it can lead to nihilism don’t fill the voids a loss of religion can leave behind. And I think that’s why we see blind faith emerging that doesn’t seem to make sense to many.

Why on earth would someone in 2026 join a community of flat earthers who have to literally ignore volumes of data in order to believe what they believe? Maybe because the community is so inviting to anyone who believes?

Why would someone defend unnecessary violence, or even terrorism in the name of God or country? Maybe because they feel othered, or fear being othered. Maybe they feel hurt and seek vengeance? Maybe they feel the government is too heavy-handed or not heavy handed enough?

Why would someone follow a leader who does things they would previously have been upset about? Maybe there is one pillar that leader stands on that supports their beliefs more than any other transgression that leader might be accused of? Maybe they feel community, shared values, and a sense of belonging are all missing in their lives because their waning beliefs in a broken religion can no longer fulfill these needs.

When people can’t seem to hold onto their religious faith, where else do they put their faith?

It seems today that it goes to all the wrong places.

We need a new kind of religion, one that is inherent in most faiths already, but often masked by evangelical fervour, threats of secularism, misinterpreted scripture, literal interpretations of metaphors, among other reasons justifiable by the keepers of the faith. That inherent idea common to all faiths, the somehow lost idea, is that we are all the children of God, and that we should be kind, caring, and even loving to all God’s children.

If that was the underlying premise of ‘our belief systems’ (intentionally plural) then the best thing we could do is to keep the faith. But when religions and more specifically religious people, focus on differences, and when charismatic leaders decide that hate, separation, and false prophecies are the goal, well then our belief systems rise only to crumble.

This is the path we are on, not an increase in atheism, because atheism is not a belief system to swap another religion for. A thing to ‘not believing in’ is not a replacement for a faith. And so what we are seeing is a rise in people looking in all the wrong place to feel safe and then blindly, misguidedly keeping the faith.

Beliefs trump intelligence

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Is it a feature or a bug? I don’t know, but what I observe is that human beings allow their beliefs to trump their intelligence.

I saw it first hand with my dad. In many respects he was the most intelligent person I ever met. He designed a process to chemically leach platinum out of recycled electronics and catalytic converters; He designed a nuclear powered airplane; He created a perfect solution of diesel fuel and water that he ran in diesel motors… And he was also a doomsday-er convinced that the end of the world as we know it was going to happen in his lifetime. It didn’t. But that belief consumed so much of his time and energy.

And so it is with religious faith. Intellectually bright people will believe their scriptures are the actual words of their God.

And so it is with conspiracy theorists, who are often smart people, yet they let their beliefs cloud over any counter arguments or logical insights that don’t match their beliefs about the conspiracies they harbour.

And so it is with political extremists, who can only see the benefits but not the consequences of their polarized views.

And so, it would seem, it is with all of us. We hold strong beliefs about the world we live in and we blindly allow our beliefs to influence our thinking, bias our views, and undermine our own intelligence.

Is it a feature that helps us find community and bond with like minded people, or is it a bug in our intellect that sabotages our ability to think logically and objectively? Again, I don’t know. What I have come to realize though, is that our beliefs seem to have some hierarchical level of control over our thoughts and actions that upstages and even eclipses our intelligence.

Still waiting

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For a few hundred people, if not thousands, September 23rd brought profound sadness and disappointment. At first that they were perhaps left behind, then that The Rapture did not actually happen. They were convinced that this was the day that believers were going to ascend to heaven. Many believing in an actual, physical ascension, where bodies float up into the air and up to a heaven in the sky.

For many of these disappointed believers, the lack of this actually happening will not alter their belief that this will one day happen. The date was wrong but they will still believe that it is coming. In fact, they will still believe that it’s going to happen in their lifetime. That is one of the common themes of ‘end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it’ prophecy believers… the idea that this is the end times and that they will be witnesses to The Rapture.

It reminds me of those workplace signs about how many days since the last injury. Like those signs, there is an inevitability that the next injury will come… the next rapture date will come. Except that for the end times believers, the lack of the event only means they guessed wrong. A new date will be chosen by some influential follower soon.

When belief is that strong, even the people who had unwavering conviction that September 23rd was the day, even the ones who prayed and believed they were given godly confirmation, will not falter in their faith. Instead, there will be a quiet period of recovery from disappointment, than a few months or years from now some false prophet will make another prediction, and the cycle will continue. After all, the testing of faith produces perseverance… It isn’t faith if it can’t be tested and still hold.

And so blindly forward the faithful will go. A lack of evidence is not proof of anything other than to test faith. Excuses are substitutes for apologies, and misinterpretations are easy to justify, be they made by others or felt by individual believers. The message is the same, The Rapture is indeed coming, it’s just the signs were not clear as to when.

And so some time in near future we will reset the sign, the one that says how many days since the last promise of rapture… and the cycle of waiting will continue.

What makes a cult?

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  1. A charismatic leader.
  2. They build an ‘Us-vs-Them’ mentality.
  3. Community building through symbols, slogans, and rituals.
  4. Belief perseverance, even in the face of contradictory evidence (and persecution).
  5. Identity is born out of loyalty and faith.

Why am I writing about this now?

You know. I wish you didn’t… But you do.

How gullible are we?

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“… it is entirely possible that future generations will look back, from the vantage point of a more sophisticated theory, and wonder how we could have been so gullible.”

— Closing sentence of Introduction to Quantum Mechanics by David J. Griffiths.

I came across this quote today and it made me wonder just how gullible we are as a species? Not just because we don’t understand quantum mechanics, not just because we don’t understand the gap between Newtonian Physics and Special Relativity, but for so many more simple and less profound reasons.

We fight over imaginary lines we call borders. We spend a considerable amount of our existence working for money… pieces of paper that only have value because we believe it has value, while our governments (we also make up silly rules for) print that money in mass volumes to keep our economies afloat.

We break into tribes based on heritage, relative strength, socioeconomics, and even skin colour. And we spend a tremendous amount of the global economy to create weapons to protect ourselves and also threaten ‘those who are not like us’.

We fight over false Gods. Why do I say false Gods? Because there are literally thousands of them, and even the largest, Christianity, doesn’t agree with who gets into heaven. So the vast majority of believers are believers in the wrong religion or wrong sect. Yet hate, discrimination, and wars are all byproducts of people of faith fighting people of different faiths, very often ‘in the name of their God’.

Human beings are playing the game of life with imaginary boundaries, imaginary political structures, imaginary currencies, and imaginary Gods. We are gullible. We are blinded by unimportant things, and in 100 years humankind will look upon us like we were as backwards as we perceive cultures and societies that did barbaric and stupid things 100’s of years ago.

Ask, seek, knock

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I am not religious, but I’ve read a fair bit of the Bible, both Old and New Testament, most of The Bhagavad Gita, a little bit of the Quran, the full Tao Te Ching many times, and I’ve dabbled in a few other scriptures.

Of these I’ve studied the Tao Te Ching the most, and at some point I want to explore this 81 verse text even more. But to me one of the most interesting verses from a religious text comes from the book of Matthew in the New Testament:

Matthew 7:7-8 “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened.”

I think that this is more true than we think… and the challenge of this is in what we actually think. Yes, we all know that person that seems to be charmed, they walk through life like the world is their oyster and good things seem to happen to them all the time. And we also know an Eeyore, someone who seems to walk around with his or her own rain cloud, much like the gloomy character in Winnie the Pooh. In both cases these people seem to get what they want, although those things are drastically different from each other. But most people we know are not as extreme as these two characters.

Yet most of us inherently do spend much of our lives getting what we ask for. The thing we don’t realize is that:

We ask the wrong questions.

We seek the wrong things.

We knock on the wrong doors.

There is a lot of talk about the power of positive thinking, and I believe that the truth in it is that thinking positively allows you to ask the right questions, seek the right goals, and find the right doors to open up for you. Yet we often don’t ask the right questions. Have you ever wondered, “Why does stuff like this happen to me?” Ask and it will be given to you.

So often we want things that we don’t know how to properly ask for. We choose to look in the wrong places for luck, love, happiness, wealth, and success. We shut doors on ourselves, blocking opportunities because we don’t believe we are worthy, successful, capable, or even lucky enough to get through the metaphorical door.

This doesn’t mean we should blindly and blissfully go through life thinking positive and suddenly we will get everything we want. It does mean that we should question how we speak to ourselves, how we internalize the things that happen to and around us. When you think the world conspires against you, conspiracies continue to show up. When we wonder why other people are so lucky, we are unintentionally asking ourselves why we are not lucky? When we are bitter because someone else has an opportunity that we want our jealousy closes us off to finding our own similar opportunities.

It’s not magical. It’s not divine intervention. It’s our ability to open ourselves to opportunities and to see them as such. It’s recognizing how we limit ourselves in what we ask and seek… and allowing ourselves to find the right doors when opportunity knocks.

Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened.

Morality police

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I have regularly created AI images to go with my blog posts since June, 2022. I try not to spend too much time creating them because I’d rather be writing blog posts than image prompts. But sometimes I try to create images and they just don’t convey what I want them to, or they come across as a bit too much in the uncanny valley, feeling unnatural. That happened with my post image 4 days ago, and I used the image anyway, because I was pressed for time.

(Look carefully at this image and you’ll see a lot wrong with it.)

I made 5 or 6 attempts to adjust my prompt, but still kept getting bad results, so I made do with the only one that resembled what I wanted.

And then for the past couple days I had a different challenge. I don’t know if it’s because of using the version of Bing’s Copilot that is associated with my school account, but my attempts to create images were blocked.

And:

However, Grok 3, a much less restricted AI, had no problem creating these images for me:

And:

I’m a little bothered by the idea that I am being limited by an AI in using these image prompts. The first one is social commentary, the second one, while a ‘hot topic’, certainly isn’t worthy of being restricted.

It begs the question, who are the morality police deciding what we can and cannot use AI to draw? the reality is that there are tools out there that have no filters and can create any image you want, no matter how tasteless or inappropriate they are, and I’m not sure that’s ideal… but neither is being prevented from making images like the ones I requested. What is it about these images requests that make them inappropriate?

I get that this is a small issue in comparison to what’s happening in the US right now. The morality police are in full force there with one group, the Christian far right, using the influence they have in the White House to impose their morality on others. This is a far greater concern than restrictions to image prompts in AI… but these are both concerns on the same continuum.

Who decides? Why do they get to decide? What are the justifications for their decisions?

It seems to me that the moral decisions being made recently have not been made by the right people asking the right questions… and it concerns me greatly that people are imposing their morals on others in ways that limit our choices and our freedoms.

Who gets to be the morality police? And why?

Extreme beliefs

I went down a rabbit hole on Twitter yesterday. It started with me watching a video related to the attempted assassination of Donald Trump. The video following this was a fundamentalist Christian talking about how this assassination attempt was pre-ordained, and this was the start of the End Times. The videos didn’t stray from this theme afterwards.

The power of religious fundamentalism never ceases to amaze me. People hoping for the rapture, or for an eternity in the afterlife, willing to sacrifice living life now for a future beyond this life. People prepared to sacrifice their life in an attempt to take another life in the name of God. People draining their bank accounts to support a church. People advocating for terrorism and yet believing they will be set free by their faith.

Religious beliefs that teach us to love, and to share, and to support their communities as well as strangers… these are religions that serve those that need religion in their lives. Extreme religious beliefs that divide, segregate, and exclude others… these are religions we must fight.

We cannot turn the other cheek when we are facing groups that undermine our safety and security. We can’t ignore people who will disrupt and undermine our lives, our liberties, and our freedom. Extreme beliefs are dangerous and they need to be dealt with as threats, as dangerous, and not just something we deal with like we would any other issue… because those acting on their extreme beliefs aren’t acting in good faith.

((What an ironic sentence to end on.))

The cult of conspiracy

I read this quote in Tim Ferriss’ 5-Bullet Friday email newsletter:

“I sometimes wonder whether conspiracy theories are an attempt to re-enchant the world in a distorted way. It’s like religion knocking on the door and trying to come back in a strange and distorted form. A sense of mystery beyond our own understanding of the world. If you ever talk to conspiracy theorists, that’s the sense you get from them. A sort of almost romantic sense of awe that there is this dark mysterious thing that a rational thing could never penetrate.” ~ Adam Curtis

Having a dad who was constantly making connections across seemingly unrelated topics, all for which he found resounding ‘evidence’ of conspiracies, this quote resonated with me. With an inclination towards conspiracy came a blind willingness to accept wild, unreliable sources of any information or claims that supported the conspiratorial narrative. Crazy, unsubstantiated theories were treated as fact.

Whenever I brought up counter arguments, and shared anything to suggest inaccuracies in a conspiracy I would get the same retort: “Who is fact checking the fact checkers, David?” Then Dad would send me an article, I’d click a link to some ‘fact’ that it mentions and it would lead to a warning page that I was going to a known Russian propaganda website. In all my years on the internet, I’d never been redirected to a page like this, except from the ‘reliable’ sources my dad followed.

“Dad, did you know the source of this information is a Russian propaganda website?”

“Even bad sources get the information right sometimes David.” This from a scientist, a man dedicated to research and detailed documentation. But the grasp of the conspiracy came from deep within, like a core faith, a religious grip that broke common sense,

“A sort of almost romantic sense of awe that there is this dark mysterious thing that a rational thing could never penetrate.”

It’s not about rational thought, nor common sense. It’s a new, distorted form of religion. Faith does not require reason, it does not follow logic. But it holds on to people and steers them in directions they are unaware that they are going. 100 pieces of counter-evidence can go blindly by, and then a crumb of evidence in support will be enough to fuel the conspiracy and shield it against the next 100 counterpoints.

Conspiracies are mysterious, even romantic. The people who follow them bear witness, they see the light, they are the believers, the keepers of the faith, the chosen ones. Logic and reason do not alter the faith of the devout… and so the cult of conspiracy continues.