I loved the book and I’m sure you will love it, too. It truly is a road to freedom from the channel thinking we’ve been subjected to. It will expose many of Hubbard’s arrogant lies and claims found in scientology.

Thank you, Chris, for another great article.

Look after your health first – and come back when you have recovered.

For now… a true story. My father studied under a man called John Polkinghorne to obtain the qualification he needed to preach for the Church of England.

Polkinghorne is an Anglican priest, theologian and ground-breaking quantum physicist who wrote many good books for laymen on all of those subjects. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Polkinghorne

I think he was wrong about God… but he was an utterly brilliant, fascinating kind of wrong. I’m glad that there are people like him about.

You can contact me anytime through my blog at https://scicrit.wordpress.com/contact-us/

Thanks for responding. You always show thoughtfulness and insight in your posts, which is why I chose to talk about this issue for the first time. I didn’t intend to imply that you are one of those committing hate speech. I do see it on the Bunker, though, and that’s one of the reasons I’m taking a break from it while my health is dicey. There are people on the Bunker who are subjected to insult on a regular basis and keep quiet about it because defending themselves does no good. I’m not only talking about Independent Scientologists, although they do take quite a beating. Religious people of all kinds are treated disrespectfully, to put it mildly.

I don’t exactly blame either science or religion for the evils done in their name. The way I see it is that every system of thought has its weaknesses as well as its strengths, and that it’s wise to be aware of them. Even the best of us can take a misstep, and there are always a contingent who will take advantage of the weaknesses in order to mislead people. Hubbard used the name of science to explain some of his ideas, not that I need to tell you that.

One of the weaknesses of science, perhaps the most dangerous, is that there are things it doesn’t have the tools to investigate at any given time. It’s not uncommon for intelligent, well-educated people – even those with degrees in the hard sciences – to wrongly assume that anything science is unable to prove doesn’t exist, or to skew experimentation to get results they are comfortable with. And they almost always get away with it.

I need to stop and rest, it’s been one hell of a day already. If you’d like to email me, please do: quicksilverpine@gmail.com.

Oh my… that’s a lot to answer…

I’m absolutely not saying that I don’t believe you. Just that I can’t enter into your subjective experience so I can’t even comment on it, except to say that it’s not mine. I offer my experiece in the hope that we can compare notes, and learn something new.

Of neccessity, I can only comment from my own viewpoint and experience. This includes such thing as waking in the middle of the night, suddenly remembering something, or finding a solution to a problem that I had been thinking about days previously.

In that sense, my mind had be working hard without ‘me’ – the surface me of everyday experience – even being aware of it. How can you still thoughts that you have no access to? You can only still the surface. While this is undoubedly beneficial it’s not the whole story.

I mean no discrespect, and honest questioning is going to be inevitable when I try to understand your inaccessible subjective experience from my (equally inacessable and quite different) point of view.

The point is to establish a dialogue so that, even if we can never agree, at least we each understand something about the other’s position and sensitivities.

The bunker discourse is robust but hardly ever tips over into hate speech (I have been around long enought to have seen the banhammer come down on that) . Besides, a few lines of text have yet to hurt me, and I have had more robust discussions with my Father (who was a lay preacher of the Church of England) and with a relgious friend, with never any conflict.

You have to be able to speak your mind honestly, and accept the opinions of others for what they are if you are going to understand them, or the valid points they might make. if you censor yourself for fear of causing ‘offence’ nobody benefits in the long run.

Regarding atheism. That’s a rejection of theism – saying ‘I don’t accept the arguments for the existance of God’. In that sense, I’m an atheist. While you may object to the ‘New Atheists’ such as Richard Dawkins, who seem to be engaged on an anti-religious crusade… so do I. They are too narrowly rationalist, something I feel strongly from my background in social science where belief is a subject of study in itself. It’s simplistic to say, ‘what you believe isn’t true’ and expect that to make a difference. The ‘New Atheists’ are preaching to the choir.

I think you are being unfair to both science and atheism when you blame them for things done in their name by fanatics and the self-serving. Those mass sterilisations were motivated by a pre-existing racism and only justified to parts of science which suited the people who carried them. Honest scientific investigation later demonstrated that there is only the human race, who came our of Africa. That knowledge is surely a force for good.

Also embedded in scientific culture, at the most basic philosphical level, is the knowledge that there is no such thing as proof – that every conclusion, however reliable is contingent on the results of new experiment. Real scientists agree with you.

Regarding the CBT research, my friend falls into the catagory you describe. He regularly takes medication and benefits from ‘talk therapy’ The research I mentioned found CBT to be as effective as medication only in cases of very mild depression, which were likey brought about by environmental, not internal factors.

in conclusion, I have tried to understand the world around me. I have come to conclusions about it, but they are contingent on new ideas and new information. I don’t think they make me better than anyone else, and I willing to freely discuss matters arising with anyone. i hope that I will not be offended by any exchange in which no offense was intended – even if someone comes up with a very awkward question indeed.

It’s taken me a long time to answer this because my response is difficult to say. As a general rule I just don’t respond to statements like this because there’s no point continuing a discussion after someone has said “I don’t believe you” on the basis of no information whatsoever.

Here’s what I am referring to: I wonder if it is even possible to ‘stop thinking’. Like a swan, you can seem to be serene on the surface, but mental process are still thrashing about, out of sight, like the swan’s webbed feet.” Also “To my mind, joy requires content, not emptying the mind.”

The second sentence I could have responded to, and will, but the first is just a statement of disbelief. You don’t believe that what I said happens to me actually happens, even to the degree of admitting that, strange though it may sound, you have no knowledge of it and have never tried to obtain any information about it. In effect, you’re pre-judging, and I don’t, as a rule, attempt to argue with prejudice because it’s pointless. You are, however, a very intelligent, thoughtful and generous person – I would say “large in spirit” if I weren’t afraid of starting yet another pointless debate – and I think you deserve a complete answer.

To begin with, the studies I was referring to determined that cognitive behavioral therapy combined with training in mindfulness is more effective than CBT alone. I have never seen any evidence indicating that any sort of talk therapy can be used to treat chemical imbalance, although it can be helpful in combination with pharmaceutical treatment to help a patient learn to recognize the unrealistic thought processes which occur as a result of living with untreated depression.

The fact is that a state of awareness without thought is possible. I know this because it has happened to me and because I have read accounts of the identical experience, achieved in exactly the method I use, dating back as far as the 13th century. People who adhere to a religious belief tend to interpret it according to that belief. I haven’t believed in any religion since I was 12 or 13, so I don’t interpret it at all, except that I know that my mind is capable of an understanding beyond anything that can be expressed and which does not relate to any intellectual process. There is a part of me that I can’t experience without shutting off my thinking. Because I first achieved this state when I was 18, 40 years ago, I can’t imagine what it must be like to go through life trapped within the limitations of one’s intellect. Never to know complete inner peace or the joy that is existence. I am incapable of unhappiness. I can be badly hurt, but it’s a transient state that I make use of in order to take the best possible care of myself. It has nothing to do with who I am.

One of the things that hurts me most is hate speech, which is tolerated without question on the Bunker as it is everywhere else. The Bunker commentaries are full of hate toward any person who has any sort of spiritual experience or religious beliefs. The oft-repeated statement “Anybody can believe anything they want” is pure condescension. The majority of people who make such statements don’t even know the meaning of the words they use. “Prayer” is not just a shopping list and “God” is not the cashier. Religious fundamentalism entails some very serious dangers in my view, which I won’t go into just now for the sake of brevity, but most religious people are not fundamentalists. I think a more secular society is in some ways healthier than what currently prevails in the USA. But I also think that science often replaces religion in fulfilling people’s emotional need for certainty, and the very obvious statement that science has its limitations provokes as much emotional outrage as telling a religious fundamentalist that their Scripture isn’t entirely flawless.

Quantum theory is the most provable theory in science, and yet we are constantly learning new things that cause us to revise our thinking. I was taught that matter and energy cannot be created or destroyed, but the Higgs boson blew that one out of the water.

It is very painful for, I think, the majority of people to acknowledge that nothing is really knowable. I’d much prefer people to latch onto an unrealistic conception of science than of spirituality, but the emotional dependence is still there. Atheism has become a replacement for religion for many of its adherents, and some of its effects have included egregious human rights violations. Just off the top of my head, think of the forced mass sterilizations of people considered by science to be genetically inferior in the early 20th century in my own country. Krafft-Ebing was once considered the last word in the study of human sexuality, and because he believed that sexuality in women causes insanity countless women in the US and Europe were subjected to clitoridectomy by their doctors. He also believed that treadle sewing machines could cause women to become insane because they might be aroused by the vibration. Boy, would what’s in my nightstand freak him out.

What almost no one seems to believe is that every human being deserves simple respect on their own terms. It is possible to learn a great deal from people who disagree with you, but you’ll never find that out if you believe that your system of belief makes you better, saner, more intelligent or more honest than they are.

There is no certainty. There is no safety. It is impossible to be honest with oneself without embracing mystery.

Hey asshole, stop spamming the Bunker.

http://www.sifliamal.com/apni-baat-manane-ka-amal/

You might find this interesting. Karen Armstrong is one of my favorite theologians, second only to Joseph Campbell. Some years ago she won a TED award, which included a $100,000 prize. She used the money to bring together religious leaders from around the world, including representatives of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, to a conference with the purpose of creating agreement on religious values. The result was the Charter for Compassion. This is a link to Karen’s page on the Charter’s website. The entire website is worth reading, but this page gives you the history of the Charter, which I thought you might like to see first.

http://www.charterforcompassion.org/index.php/charter/karen-armstrong-2008-ted-prize

I hope you enjoy this!

I know someone who participated in a research programme about the use of mindfulness based CBT in the treatment of depression. It was very positive – for mild depression It concluded that for some, it worked as well as anti-depressants. For more serious depression, however, it had little effect.

CBT seems to me to be a therapy that could do ex-Scientologists a lot of good and, when I get around to it, I will write a blog post on that subject.

For me religious faith (as distinct from just taking a gamble on something you want to be true) is fascinating because it is arbitrary. As I child, I wondered why all the people around me had one faith, but if you went elsewhere in the world, they all had another. That was the beginning of my perspective on religion as a socially constructed phenomenon.

I wonder if it is even possible to ‘stop thinking’. Like a swan, you can seem to be serene on the surface, but mental process are still thrashing about, out of sight, like the swan’s webbed feet.

I’m a fairly laid-back individual, and keep my mind clear with activities which you have to concentrate on (e.g. ju-jitsu). I find that this stills the noise, when you have had a demanding day.

To my mind, joy requires content, not emptying the mind. However, I do sometimes experience the opposite of existential angst – a profound wonder at just being here in this incredibly way, as a very odd animal on a very unlikely planet, in the middle of an incomprehensibly large space.

The thing about faith is that it is purely subjective. Belief should be, far more than it is, objective. It is entirely possible to have faith in something you don’t believe in. People do that all the time. If they didn’t, there would be far fewer marriages, for example. 😉 It is, in fact, literally impossible to both believe and have faith in something. The two are mutually exclusive. Religion would be a lot better off if it would quit trying to prove itself on a rational basis. It never works. Nor, in my opinion, is it necessary.

The experience of the numinous is common to most religious beliefs, but is not confined to religious beliefs. It’s a mental state completely without thought, and I highly recommend it. It took me two years to achieve. I was 18 at the time. Now, at 57, it’s effortless. Psychotherapy calls it mindfulness, and it is used in conjunction with cognitive behavioral therapy to treat depression. People who hold religious beliefs tend to explain it in terms of their belief system. Not having such a belief system myself, I don’t attribute it to anything. I value it because (1) it is an indescribably pleasant experience of simultaneous joy and peace, and (2) reminds me of who I am and what’s worth paying attention to. I do consider it a spiritual experience, but since I have no definition of what a god is, the word “spiritual” doesn’t mean what it does to many people who use the term. It brings me into an understanding of my life and what it means to me to be alive, above and beyond its temporal manifestation. That’s as close to explaining it as I can get, and I think the word “spiritual” does apply. I recognize the paucity of the explanation, and I would certainly never ask anyone who hasn’t experienced it to believe in it. Frankly, I would doubt the mental health of anyone who did.