[From Yabberz Greatest Hits] Perhaps right at the core of most religious thought is the idea that "things happen for a reason". In the Biblical tradition, this reason is in the Mind of God. His plan has a fundamentally moral aspect (it's good and merciful). Everyone outside of mental hospitals agrees that the "plan" is completely inscrutable. Even when stripped of all the particulars of theology, many people cling to the last vestiges of this idea. They ask "why" a person is "taken away" in the prime of life or "why" innocent, good people are destroyed by random events like hurricanes and earthquakes. The question is always rhetorical. It's rude to attempt an answer. Even those who think there is no reason feel in their bones that there  ought  to be one. I've often encountered people who earnestly believe in "fate", which is (to me) the silly idea that whatever happened was what somehow  had  to happen. This pulls...

I spend quite a lot of time chatting with people on the  Yabberz  site. Some of the things that come up deserve to be saved here .. About Religion and Nationalism ... I don't think I depart widely from the accepted definition of "religion". Your beliefs about trees don't really qualify. To my mind, the cultural connection is key, as is the ritual nature and the idea that religious beliefs "explain" a broad swath of human experience. The big issue I have with "religious" people is that they regard the issue as closed. There are those who believe as they do and those who don't. Religions tend to impose explicit or implicit penalties on "unbelievers", ranging from shunning to charges of treason. The problem is that this also freezes the definition of religion itself, so that, for example, the religion of Nationalism (responsible for the wars of the 20th century) is not recognized as such. Nationalism is all about culture and figuring out...

In a previous post , I challenged the idea that our "mind" or "soul" should be pictured as something inside our body (it feels like it's behind our eyes). Separation from "mind" and the physical world goes a long way back. It makes it possible to think of the Christian idea of the "soul", whose fate is very different from the physical body. In Eastern traditions, the idea of reincarnation is more or less assumed. In others, the "soul" of ancestors are assumed to hang around in some way long after their bodies have been discarded. But we know better. Especially in the Zen traditions that feed into the Western idea of "Mindfulness", we are starting to picture the "contents" of the mind (ideas, sensations, hopes, dreams ...) as being the mind. In other words, the mind does not have ideas, it is ideas. To put it another way, there's "nobody home" in our heads and the sensation that "we" inhab...