LSP56: The Roots of Christianity and Why They Still Matter

Early on in this collection of essays about finding relationship with God, I wrote a piece called "It's the Roots, Not the Fruits, That Matter," and there I suggested that the key to reconnecting with God is understanding how your brain-soul nexus works. I also said that if you insist on trying to find God by climbing trees that are covered in the horrible thorns of distrust in God, you're going to get stabbed and cut and covered in painful scars.

As I conclude the Lessons from the Spiral Path blog, I feel it's important for me to state why, despite everything my angelic friends have taught me about the perils of assorted ideologies, I self-identify as a Christian.

This is the Geometric Stair of St. Paul's Anglican Cathedral, London, UK. The spiralling cantilevered staircase was designed by Sir Christopher Wren in about 1705. Photo credit JAT 2024.

When I first set foot on my own Spiral Path of wonder, science, and faith, I had no inkling that I'd eventually return to the Christian roots of my upbringing. I don't know where I thought I'd end up -- maybe at some pinnacle of New Age enlightenment? -- but I didn't imagine for a second that my spiritual journey would take me back to the core teachings of Jesus.

After many years of study and contemplation and conversation with God and God's angels, including Jesus himself, I think I can finally express why I now believe that Christianity in its best form (not Christianity in its worst form) is the surest hope for healing your brain-soul nexus and opening your inner heart to the experience of God's love.

Crown of Thorns plant. Photo credit JAT 2018.

I've spent a lot of time in my other books on the problems I've seen in Christianity. I'm very honest about the grave harms perpetrated under the label of Christianity. Paul's teachings in particular grafted some extremely abusive thorns onto the message of Jesus. We're still grappling today with the results of those thorns -- thorns that have hurt women and gays and children and God in the form of hate-filled fundamentalist and evangelical preaching.

But Paul wasn't Jesus. We have the power within our hearts and minds to reject what Paul told us about God, and to turn instead to the roots of Jesus' teachings about God. We have the potential to grow the tree that springs from Jesus' two great laws: "The first is, 'Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.' The second is this, 'You shall love your neighbour as yourself.' There is no other commandment greater than these" (Mark 12:29-31).

The roots of Jesus' teachings lead to many important spiritual and emotional and intellectual fruits, all of which may help you sense God's presence in your life. The Christianity of Jesus asks you to know yourself in positive ways; calls upon you to respect the balance between heart and mind; rejoices with you in the healing power of love and forgiveness and humbleness; reminds you to use the gift of free will wisely and well; gives you uplifting ways to think of Mother Father God and your soul and the afterlife; and most of all tells you that God loves you just as much as God has loved all the famous figures of history. No other major world religion teaches you that you can be close to God even if you aren't purely perfect, purely pious, or purely pure. It's enough for God that you try each day to understand what it means to love.

Jesus knew what few religious teachers before him articulated. He understood that Divine Love is a two-way street. He told us we must love our God with all our heart, all our soul, all our mind, and all our strength, but this love we give to God is not a form of worship. It's a way of being like God, living in the image of God -- honouring and respecting our loving God by paying our blessings forward instead of hoarding them for ourselves. There's nothing quite like the inspiration that comes from accepting God's Love despite our very humble humanness.

When we love our neighbours as ourselves, we do only what God has already done. When we love with courage and hope and inclusiveness, we are walking in the footsteps of God.

My wish for you is that you may find the faith you seek on your own Spiral Path.

God bless!

LSP55: You, Your Life, and Your Afterlife: Abundant Gifts and Blessings

It's often said the best things in life are free. Nowhere does this hold more true than in your relationship with God.

St. Lawrence was a 3rd century church deacon who was martyred in Rome in 258 CE. Tradition reports that when he was asked to turn over the wealth of the church to Roman authorities, he instead gave it to the poor and the marginalized, those who are the church's true treasures. This stained glass window was produced in 1889 by Charles Eamer Kempe, and is now on display at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, England (gifted by Mr. Walter E. Tower). Photo credit JAT 2023.

The wonderful thing about having a relationship with God is that it's a gift -- a freely given gift between you and God -- that doesn't cost you any money and doesn't have to be carried out at a special time or a special place. It can happen anywhere. And it's an ongoing gift, not a one-time thing. Once you open your heart to a relationship with God, the blessings just keep coming.

Think of the things in your life that bring great joy. Start with your own conception. Maybe your parents had to spend some money to prepare a family home or to heal some medical issues that could complicate a pregnancy. But the moment of conception itself -- that was a gift from God, and it was free!

Think about your upbringing. Think about the experience of learning how to be a human being in a whole new world. When you picked up a something hard and heavy, like a rock, and you dropped it on your foot, you were learning about the laws of physics. And the courage to learn was free!

When you tasted what words meant, and you explored how the spices and flavours of words can shape your relationships, you were partaking of the mystery of language, a mystery that ties everything together in Creation. And it was free!

When you listened to songs and hymns and carols, and you sang them till your eyes brimmed with tears of devotion, that was free!

When you watched the buds on a plant unfurl in beauty, or paused at the majesty of a storm-filled sky, or smelled the gratitude of the soil after a long sought rain, you felt your humble connection to Creation, and the sacredness was free!

When your beloved one was close to death, and longed for release from pain and suffering, and you saw the time of passing was near, your grief couldn't take from you the trust that your loved one was close to God. As your heart broke, you felt the love -- the love which is free!

As you think about the most memorable, most transformative moments of your life (especially the feeling of God's presence, if you've had such an experience) you begin to realize that those feelings of connection, love, meaning -- they're all free. They all come from within your heart and soul. They're yours. You didn't "buy" them, because you didn't have to. You were born with them and you own them. Permanently. Nobody can take them from you unless you let them.

When you're going through a difficult time, it can help to think of your life as a one-of-a-kind story. The best stories are about rich characters, complex relationships, difficult decisions, and transformative change. Everything that's in your book belongs to you, and you'll take all of it home to Heaven when you die. There you'll have many opportunities to discuss with angelic friends and mentors what you learned during your life as a human being. You, in turn, will learn from the stories of your equally blessed friends. Every story adds to the tapestry of Divine Love. This early 14th century Book of Hours, once used for private devotions, is part of the Kenneth Thomson collection at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Photo credit JAT 2018.

This brings me to the question of religion. All major world religions do some good things (such as teaching people about human morality) and all major world religions do some bad things (such as teaching people they won't be saved and won't be allowed into Heaven unless they follow all the right doctrines, all the right practices, all the right Saviours).

Questions about the afterlife continue to haunt countless human beings in every generation. Many people turn to religious leaders to try to uncover what will happen to them when they die. Too often religious leaders use this deep seated human need as a way to acquire power for themselves, to manipulate their flocks, to demean and subjugate others with promises about future punishments from God or Source. But they say these frightening things about the End Times for themselves, not for you. They say they're worried about your soul, but what they really mean is they're worried about their own authority. They want you to be scared about what happens when you die because fearful people are much easier to control than courageous people.

These same religious leaders use the trump card of justice to explain why their doctrines of afterlife are not only true but necessary. They say that future punishment for earthly crimes is the only way to balance the universal scales of right and wrong and help good conquer evil. But they're assuming when they say it that God is too stupid and too weak to intervene in our daily lives in ways that Mother Father God -- not human leaders -- deem appropriate. It's the very idea that God constantly intervenes whether we like it or not that undermines everything religion has to say about Materialist laws of cause and effect. Just ask Dr. Eben Alexander. He didn't ask to be put in a coma and sent along on a soul journey to the very gates of Heaven. He didn't ask to become a human messenger about the inclusiveness and expansiveness of Divine Love. But it happened anyway.

Dr. Alexander's near-death experience was an unusual, but nonetheless valid, free gift from God to help him better understand the pathways open to him for building a relationship with God and Creation while he's still here on Planet Earth. Despite the struggles he went through after he awakened from his coma, I have no doubt he'd do it again in a heartbeat. He can now be of service in ways he never could have imagined before his awakening. Such service is in itself a profound gift.

As you reflect on the free gifts you've participated in during your own human life, let me ask you this: if God surrounds you with innumerable free gifts while you're here on Planet Earth, why would God suddenly take away all those free gifts just because you've transitioned to a non-Materialist state of being? Why would God suddenly punish you for mistakes you can no longer fix in the absence of a 3D biological body? Why would God give you love and forgiveness while you're a human being (as Jesus taught) but suddenly rescind these gifts and replace them with laws and contracts and covenants as soon as you die? Does this make any sense to you?

God the Mother and God the Father aren't fickle. And they don't play favourites. So whatever you've been told by religious or spiritual leaders about future punishment or karmic rebirth is a load of treacherous clickbait.

Heaven is the place where all of God's children are welcomed after our difficult lives on Planet Earth. No one is excluded. We were angels -- persons-of-soul -- before we were born here. When we die, we resume our lives as children of God, though we understand as never before how secure we are in the infinite wisdom of God's love.

We are, as Jesus once tried to tell us, forever blessed.

LSP54: Why Hatred Is a Free Will Choice - And Why Everyone Needs to Face the Truth About Hatred

 

It's common these days for spiritual leaders of all stripes to speak eloquently and volubly of love's power to heal the world. We're especially keen to talk about the power of love after we've been asked to deal with yet another horrific attack on innocent people, such as the recent gun attack at Stoneman Douglas high school in Florida  or the van attack in Toronto. When our fellow human beings choose to behave like monsters, we're quick to respond by sharing thoughts and prayers on social media, holding candlelight vigils, and making donations on crowd-sourcing sites. This is all well and good. What I don't see is a willingness on the part of influential commentators to ask why the violent perpetrators felt such hatred towards others and why they thought it was okay to act on their hatred. I don't see people asking what hatred is and why we're seeing a resurgence of this beastly human emotion throughout the world.

It's not good enough to sweep these questions under the carpet by proclaiming that hatred is simply a void in a person's head where love should be, as if it's not the hate-filled person's moral responsibility.

Hatred is not a lack of anything. Hatred is a moral choice. And unless a person can demonstrate that his/her biological brain has been catastrophically damaged by a head injury or a psychotic break or a viral attack or mercury poisoning or severe dementia or something else along the lines of an extreme physiological force, that person is responsible for the choice to hate others. 

As with all major meta-choices in life, hatred is a learned behaviour that evolves over time. You don't suddenly wake up one morning and decide to hate everyone whose name starts with a "J" (unless, as mentioned in the paragraph above, you've experienced a traumatic brain injury). Hatred is way of coping with a life you just don't like, a life that doesn't match what you believe you're entitled to. Hatred rewrites your brain's moral code and gives you permission to override the quiet whispering of  your soul's inner voice (that is, your conscience).

Irrefutable proof that hatred is a moral choice is found in the history of slavery among human cultures throughout time, region, and religious tradition. No one of conscience could ever believe that slavery is acceptable to God or the soul. Yet countless millions have persuaded themselves that slavery is a morally acceptable way to take what they think God owes them. Shown here is part of an Egyptian wall painting on display at the British Museum, London, UK. Photo credit JAT 2024.

Here is my working definition of hatred: Hatred is the choice to project your own personal responsibility onto somebody else so you don't have to deal with the consequences of your own thoughts, feelings, or actions. 

Hatred is the choice to blame other people for your own lack of happiness.

Hatred is the choice to blame other people for your own selfishness.

Hatred is the choice to blame other people for your own status addiction.

Hatred is the choice to blame other people for your own lack of self-knowing and self-love.

Hatred is the choice to blame other people for the rage you feel when someone tells you you've made a mistake.

Hatred is the choice to blame other people for the rage you feel when someone tells you you're not special and you're not chosen and you're not "better" than anyone else.

Hatred is the choice to blame other people for the rage you feel when someone tells you you're not perfect and you're never going to be perfect.

Hatred is the choice to blame other people because you don't think you should ever have to deal with your own feelings of shame or guilt.

Hatred is the choice to blame other people when you realize you haven't yet achieved your "rightful" place as a saviour, Messiah, or enlightened teacher of justice and mercy, a place you're so certain you deserve.

Hatred is an inevitable consequence of your own belief that you already know yourself so well that you couldn't possibly fool yourself into believing things about yourself that simply aren't true.

In short, hatred is your brain's way of trying to prove to itself that you're a really nice person who's trying to save others when, in fact, you're a mean, nasty person who's narcissistic and selfish and refuses to take personal responsibility for your own choices and beliefs and attitudes towards others.

Among the narcissistic self-delusions that create no end of human suffering are these:

• a belief that you're incapable of making mistakes because you have all the right education and all the right knowledge
• a belief that you're better than other people because you have the only correct ideological understanding of the universe
• a belief in the superiority of your own mental processes because your logic is obviously impeccable
• a belief that you deserve to feel moral outrage if anyone suggests you should feel shame or guilt about the choices you've made (including religious choices)
• a belief that you're using all your exquisite knowledge and specialness and logic to save other people from their own stupidity (though you probably realize you shouldn't say this part out loud)

Hatred is a terrible force, and it creates indescribable suffering in the world, but it exists only because individual human beings and certain communities allow it to exist.

It exists where individuals and ideological communities refuse to be honest with themselves about what human beings are capable of when they embrace a loving and humble relationship with God and with themselves. 

Of course, the choice to love with humbleness and courage is also a choice. Love and hate are at opposite ends of the free will spectrum. But the great thing about free will is that you can change your mind about the kind of person you want to be. Even if your family, religious community, or social community have encouraged you to be a person who hates, you can always decide you no longer want to be that person. You can decide to learn -- to remember -- how to love.

A particular passage in the New Testament summarizes these thoughts beautifully. The passage I'm thinking of is found in 1 Corinthians 13:1-8a, so it's long been attributed to the apostle Paul. I'm pretty certain, however, that this short and timeless ode to Divine Love was written by Jesus and later stolen by Paul as part of the latter's ongoing efforts to make his teachings seem more closely aligned with those of Jesus.

It goes like this (using the NRSV translation, mostly):

If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have piety, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.

Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Love never ends. 

What love looks like: Light, openness, shared space, healing beauty, one well of water that quenches the thirst of all people equally. Shown here is the well in the cloister garden of Westminster Abbey, London, England. Photo credit JAT 2023.

LSP53: Why the Practice of "No Right and No Wrong" Hurts Your Brain and Damages Your Empathy

The dispute began with this small saying posted over a photo: "Forgive people in your life, even those who are not sorry for their actions. Holding on to anger only hurts you, not them."

The first person to reply didn't want to talk about forgiveness or holding onto anger. He wanted to dismiss both of these important emotional and spiritual issues by playing the trump card of "non-judgment." So he said, "I would suggest that learning and practising NON-judgement would eliminate any and all need for forgiveness and lead to a more loving and peaceful world."

His definition of "non-judgment," as revealed by a later comment, is this: "These days, I tend to ask myself just one question about any event that I see - 'Would I like to see that in my autobiography.' NO judgement of 'right' or 'wrong', 'good' or 'bad'. It just IS and it is up to me to decide how to respond - or not respond."

A forgiving brain reminds me of this modified photo of the Lady Chapel ceiling at Westminster Abbey, London, England. Forgiveness is strong and orderly, but also organic, layered, and subtly interconnected. Photo credit JAT 2023.

 
He was not all pleased with my first response to him, which went like this: "It's true that those who practise non-judgment see no need for forgiveness. It's also true that those who practise non-judgment believe firmly that this will lead to a more loving and peaceful world. However, there's no evidence that non-judgment actually creates what it claims to create. What it seems to create is rampant narcissism, self-entitlement, morality that's "convenient" and changeable depending on the circumstances, and a diminished sense of personal responsibility."

Among other things he said to me, he demanded backing for my comments. So although it's unlikely anything I offer in the way of research will interest him, I decided this would be a good time to talk about why the current practice of non-judgment (as defined above) is harmful to the brain and why it leads to widespread narcissism, self-entitlement, fluid morality, and a diminished sense of personal responsibility.

First, I'd like to make it super, ultra-clear that when I'm talking about the practice of non-judgment, I'm not in any rejecting the practice of trying to see your fellow human beings through the loving eyes and ears of kindness, compassion, inclusiveness, and equality before God. Obviously, it's a good thing to try to see the best in everyone. And, obviously, it's a good thing to help others on the difficult and confusing journey of trying to be the best self one can be as a human being.

The spiritual practice of non-judgment, wherein nothing is deemed to be either "right or wrong," "good or bad," is the specific practice I'm objecting to. According to this belief system, things just "are," and you're not supposed to have an opinion about them one way or the way. 

You may decide that a particular choice isn't a good one for you -- for example, you may decide not to copy the choices of Las Vegas shooter Stephen Paddock -- but you're really not supposed to have an opinion one way or the other on what Paddock did. As teachers such as Neale Donald Walsch and Eckhart Tolle would have it, Paddock was following a false mental construction or offering resistance to life. No one who has accepted the teachings of non-judgment would want to do such a violent, unloving thing, say these teachers. But now that he's done it, there's no need to forgive Paddock, because in order to forgive him, you'd first have to decide his actions were immoral. And that would be a judgment.

So yes . . . it makes perfect sense within the non-judgment belief system to say that forgiveness isn't needed.

Unfortunately, the brain science says otherwise.

The human brain is a vast assortment of neurons and glial cells and networks of connectivity and neurotransmitters and so on, with current estimates of the total number of neurons now standing at 86 billion accompanied by about an equal number of glial cells.

For many decades in the twentieth century, the belief that the adult brain couldn't grow new neurons was scientific dogma -- and vigorously defended dogma, at that. Despite some early evidence to the contrary, it wasn't until the late 1990's that researcher Elizabeth Gould was able to convincingly overturn this longstanding tenet of neuroscience. Today, a mere 20 years later, no reputable researcher would deny the brain's remarkable ability to reshape itself by building new neurons, building new networks, and dismantling cells and connections that are no longer needed. The umbrella term for this malleability is neuroplasticity and the process of growing new neurons is called neurogenesis.

The important point here is that until doctors and other medical professionals began to understand the full potential of neuroplasticity, many of them based their practical care decisions on false beliefs about the brain. Patients who could have benefited from care regimens designed to encourage the brain to repair itself were instead being told nothing could be done. Patients in need of neurological help didn't receive the therapy they needed, not because of a lack of care and concern but because of a lack of proper understanding of how the biological brain actually works.

The same thing has been happening in spiritual and religious circles. Certain beliefs and spiritual practices are being recommended in the well-intentioned belief that such practices will help people create a more loving and peaceful world. But if these practices interfere at a biological level with the brain's ability to exhibit traits such as empathy, altruism, gratitude, forgiveness, trust, love, and sense of meaning, then we need to be honest about these practices and revisit their usefulness for those who seek healing and deeper relationships with themselves, each other, and God.

Fascinating new research supported by the use of brain scanning technologies has revealed that the brain contains multiple networks -- like highly specific paths or roadways -- that connect certain regions of the brain to produce specific human traits. New networks are being suggested and theorized about all the time, so it's not possible for me to include a comprehensive list, but we now have data to point to the default mode network; the interoception network; the salience network; and the theory of mind network, to name a few. Networks aren't separate from each other and tend to overlap at certain key "hubs." But without these networks, we wouldn't be able to process, regulate, and put into action the complex thoughts, emotions, memories, skills, and perceptions that make us human in a broad sense and also in a unique individual sense.

The brain's networks are so complex that there's always a struggle to keep them in balance. Sometimes an area of the brain is overactive (which affects any networks the area is connected to) and sometimes an area is underactive (which also affects any relevant networks). In addition, entire networks can become dysfunctional, which can become quite serious from a medical point of view because of demonstrated links to specific neurological and psychiatric disorders. The dorsomedial default network, for example, which is supposed to help the brain regulate pain perception, self-knowledge, empathy, and person perception (among other traits) is implicated in a number of major disorders when the links in the network become damaged or are shown to be metabolically overactive or underactive.

In other words, when a network is working in balanced and healthy ways, we can expect to see outward signs of that inner healthy balance. When a person's dorsomedial default network isn't suffering from the insults of illness or injury or genetic factors, for instance, we can expect to see a person who has empathy for others, appropriate responses to pain, and no significant social and communication abnormalities. But with damage to this network comes suffering. Depression, autism, schizophrenia, and obsessive compulsive disorder have all been linked in various ways and in varying degrees to dysfunctions in this network.

And then there's the brain network involved in making moral decisions. Yes, I'm afraid to say there really is such a thing. This network, which uses the temporal-parietal junction, the medial prefrontal cortex, and the middle temporal gyrus (as well as a few other regions), uses the same brain areas that are involved in both theory of mind and empathy. The health and the interconnectivity of these brain areas determines your ability to make moral decisions, your ability to empathize with others (an emotional trait), and your ability to process the more abstract and cognitive aspects of social skills (theory of mind) -- all three at one time. These three important aspects of humanity are interconnected and, despite what you've been told by certain spiritual teachers, can't be biologically disconnected from each other. Nor should you want them to be. These traits reinforce each other and lead to wise decisions that balance both your emotional reasoning skills and your cognitive reasoning skills. It's win-win when you balance your heart and your mind.

If, on the other hand, you train your brain through the practice of non-judgment to ignore your natural, built-in, hard-wired ability to make moral decisions, you'll be rewiring your brain. (It's the use-it-or-lose-it aspect of neuroplasticity, which allows you to change your brain architecture over time through the repeated application of certain free will thoughts and practices.) Unfortunately, this will also impair your brain's ability to feel empathy and your ability to process the cognitive aspects of your relationships, since both of these traits rely on the brain areas harnessed by moral reasoning -- the areas you just intentionally hacked to bits. Lack of moral reasoning and lack of empathy go hand in hand. And it should go without saying that a person who has lost the ability to feel empathic care for others becomes, at the very least, narcissistic, self-entitled, and unable to override his or her own emotional egocentrism.

And, for those who still don't believe forgiveness is necessary, the neuroscientific evidence gets worse. Several recent papers on the neuroscientific basis for forgiveness reveal that granting forgiveness activates the same brain areas as moral cognition, empathy, and theory of mind social reasoning. In addition, there's evidence that the practices of gratitude and altruism, with their links to moral choices and actions, also use some of the same brain areas.

Like the unfolding of individual blossoms on a single orchid stem, the brain's ability to manifest certain soul-based traits such as morality, empathy, and forgiveness depends on a small number brain regions that are linked to each other and produce these traits in sequence. Photo credit JAT 2022.

So there's no getting out of it. You're born with a brain that comes with its own internal software packages for morality, empathy, social cognition, forgiveness, gratitude, and altruism, all of which are biologically intertwined and all of which help you be the most loving person you can be as a human. The trick to not losing any of these desperately needed traits is to treat them as a "package deal." Each time you practice one of these spiritual skills -- which means you're activating and strengthening specific brain areas -- you make it easier for your brain to navigate the other skills in the package.

It's the package as a whole that gives us the tools we need to bring love and peace into the world. So do your spiritual brain a favour. Strengthen the best attributes of your brain so you can go out there and make a difference in the world. Learn from the mistakes made by people such as Stephen Paddock, find the courage to forgive them, and then take the time to teach yourself and others how to be the person you really want to be.

You'll be surprised at what you can do when you learn to use your brain wisely.

LSP52: The Twelve Days of Faith

It's often suggested in our culture today that religion and faith have little relevance and don't contribute much to our lives.

Well, if you believe it's not important to have a healthy brain, then I suppose you're right to pour contempt on those who can feel God's presence in their lives. But there's a cost to scorning faith, as so many today are discovering.

If you want to have a life filled with love and meaning and purpose, you need a healthy, balanced brain. And in order to have a healthy, balanced brain, you need faith.

Faith -- which I'm defining as a relationship with God that endures in the absence of sacred texts -- is nothing like the superstitious mumbo jumbo decried by those who have never felt faith. Faith is a deeply enriching emotional experience that adds clarity, common sense, patience, and humour to our otherwise confusing human lives.

Faith changes the brain. It calls on the brain to wire itself in ways that promote the best and most mysterious aspects of human existence, aspects such as empathy, creativity, openness to change, and the quest for meaning -- in other words, what we call the "heart." Faith tells your brain you want to be in relationship with God and all Creation. This in turn prompts your brain to spend time, energy, and biological resources on the task of building the networks that let you feel these life-changing connections. 

As it turns out, these are the same brain networks you depend on for feeling good not only about God but about yourself and other people in your life. Same brain, same networks, same feelings of empathy and love. Jesus has said to me, "Love is love is love." This seems to me an apt way to understand how the brain actually processes the remarkable experience of agape -- the selfless and transformative love we feel when we set aside our fear and narcissism and choose relationship with God instead. It's all intertwined in certain brain networks that we can't separate no matter how much we'd like to. You can certainly try to separate them -- many people have been sure they can overcome the brain's natural Dual Process blueprint through the application of logic alone -- but you'll eventually start to feel dissociated from your own empathy and sense of meaning (if you can even tap into your heart at all).

Herewith is my updated version of the well-known (but sometimes not so well-loved) Christmas carol "The Twelve Days of Christmas." It's all about the ways in which faith can give you a lasting set of gifts -- not on the outside but on the inside, where nobody can take them away from you. These gifts of faith are all part of the brain package you need if you want to be able to love God and love your neighbour with all your heart, all your mind, all your soul, and all your courage. Please sing along if the spirit strikes you!

The Twelve Days of Faith
(presented in reverse order to minimize the torture):

On the twelfth day of Christmas, my true faith gave to me:
Twelve shades of Meaning
Eleven kinds of healing
Ten ways o'giving
Nine ways o'learning
Eight ways o'hearing
Seven tales a'reading
Six songs a'singing
True Empathy
Four mysteries
Three deep dreams
Two hugs from God
And a Heart and a way to be.

May God bless you and may God's loving presence light your way this day and always.

LSP51: Do You Agree with Pope Francis on the Question of Hypocritical Catholics Versus Atheists?

Last week, Pope Francis made international headlines when he criticized hypocrisy among Catholics who rigorously observe Catholic rituals but don't apply Christian virtues to their daily lives. This in itself wasn't an original insight, as anyone who knows the Bible can tell you. What attracted attention was Pope Francis' decision to quote this popular modern sentiment: "But to be a Catholic like that, it's better to be an atheist."

So is Pope Francis right? Is it true that an atheist is capable of leading a more virtuous life than a person who believes in God? Are atheists generally less hypocritical than Christians?

First, I want to be clear about the definition I'm using for atheist. I'm not talking about the people who are troubled by doubts and questions about God and who therefore aren't sure which direction they should turn in; I'm talking about the people who are no longer troubled by such doubts or questions because they've a made a clear and conscious decision to reject the notion of a living God.

In my experience, it's the people who are most conscious about their decision to reject God who are the most hypocritical individuals I've had the misfortune to meet.

A few years ago, I worked for such a person, a store manager who was the boss from hell. For the purposes of this essay, I'll call her Celia.

Celia was a woman in her 40's who had worked in retail for many years. She was a married mother of three, and she had a special love for nature photography. She was also, as voiced almost from the moment I met her, a passionate advocate of progressive values and human rights legislation, a person who wouldn't tolerate the slightest form of injustice, and an avowed atheist who spoke with righteous logic about the many harms caused by organized religion. She was, in short, the very model of a virtuous Canadian atheist.

But Celia had a dirty secret. She was profoundly hypocritical. She used her position as a retail manager not to lift others up through positive example but to bash other people down through a particularly insidious form of schadenfreude that loves the law but not the spirit of the law.

Celia lived to find fault in others so she could judge them as unworthy citizens who had committed crimes and deserved to be punished, all in the name of righteousness. So, instead of doing her job as manager, she would sit in the back of the store and obsessively watch the store's security cameras so she could catch small infractions of the "rules." She would make new rules, fail to communicate the new rules to staff members, punish us for breaking the rules, then set aside the new rules and replace them with more new rules the next day. She seemed unaware of how fickle and unprofessional and downright nasty her actions seemed to the rest of us. Meanwhile, she was so busy hunting down criminals, she wasn't leading the sales floor, or organizing stock, or promoting good relationships among staff so the store could operate efficiently and compassionately. She was just . . . dedicating herself to her "higher calling," her calling as a righteous warrior.

She was living in her own little world of purity and justice, and, from her point of view, she was righting a whole series of terrible wrongs. So she felt justified in firing anyone who didn't meet her standards, which was pretty much everyone. (After a while, I started keeping a list.) At any given time, she had a "favourite" employee and a "probational" employee, though you could quickly and quixotically fall from being favoured to hated. One by one, she pushed us under the bus. I knew my time was coming to an end when she'd already fired everyone else who had given her "just cause." I was frantically looking for another job, but I wasn't fast enough. She'd set her vigilante sights on me, and there was no salvation for me. I got the boot because I dared to say in private to some other employees what I thought of her treatment of us. One of those employees was foolish enough to trust Celia's words about fairness and justice, and told Celia what I'd said. That employee didn't last much longer there than I did.

Celia's real problem was that she lacked any sense of true humbleness (with the meaning I've written about in previous posts). She was deeply narcissistic and absolutely certain of her "right to be right" (a brain issue I've also written about). She couldn't tolerate her own mistakes, so problems and doubts and questions always had to be somebody else's fault. Not only were the mistakes not her own, but she devoutly believed that all mistakes could be eradicated and that permanent perfection could be achieved through the proper application of human logic, law, justice, purity, and holiness -- with she herself, of course, being an excellent example of how to bring about a state of permanent perfection without relying on stupid superstitions like faith in God.

Well, guess what, folks. What Celia believed in, and what Celia lived by, was pure System 2 thinking and pure System 2 folly. Over the years -- perhaps as the result of a difficult childhood -- Celia had trained her brain to stop accepting the valuable input of her brain's System 1 processing system. She didn't want to feel empathy for others (because System 1 empathy, trust, and faith, unlike System 2 agreeableness, sometimes hurt from within). She didn't want to feel humble. She didn't want to ask difficult questions about God and do the hard work of coping with messy System 1 meaning and purpose. Most especially, she didn't want anyone else to tell her what to do or how to do it. She wanted control. She wanted to be in charge of the rules so she could change them at will and have a sense of power over others. She wanted to say she's a virtuous person without having to give up her "right to be right," her right to be happy in whatever way she damn well pleased.

In short, she wanted an excuse to proclaim herself a righteous warrior without ever having to do the hard work of loving your God and loving your neighbour as yourself.

She's an atheist because the atheistic worldview (with its eradication of System 1 brain input) gives her permission to be a controlling, narcissistic, unloving, hypocrite who speaks volubly about justice and mercy but actually prefers to terrorize others through her action.

I've encountered few atheists who will not resort to ad hominem attacks on people of faith at the slightest provocation (that provocation often being the simple wearing of a cross or the simple mentioning of God). Atheists who go on the attack (and many of them seem to believe it's their moral duty to attack) don't just argue on the grounds of logic or science but find it very easy to slip into hate-filled diatribes about the stupidity of anyone who trusts in God. The viciousness of an atheist in hot pursuit of a faith-based target is a scary sight indeed. (Survival of the fittest, no doubt?)

One aspect of being a cataphatic nature mystic is the sensitivity one develops to metaphors from nature. So when I went through my photo files to find an illustration to describe what it feels like to be attacked by an atheist, this photo, from a particularly nasty February 2015 storm, jumped out at me. The cold and vicious winds drove their payload of snow so strongly at every target that even the vertical bricks of my neighbour's house weren't spared. My personal faith is as sure and steady as these bricks, but when an atheist chooses to attack . . . it feels as if I've been blasted by calculated waves of pure, cold, logical hatred.

I agree with Pope Francis that all atheists will go to heaven, and I agree that all atheists should be treated with dignity and respect because they're human beings and children of God just like everybody else.

But this doesn't mean I find the moral choices of atheists acceptable.

There's no virtue to be found in an atheist's "right to be right." And atheists aren't less hypocritical than System-2-dominant Christians (the Catholic hypocrites Pope Francis has complained about). The only way for any of us to stop living as hypocrites is to embrace the full capacity of our human brains (System 1 and System 2 balanced in harmonious ways), to learn what it means to love and forgive and learn and grow at the deepest levels of heart combined with mind combined with soul combined with body on an ongoing basis till the day we die.

If you think you can do all this without asking God for help, you must really think highly of yourself.

LSP50: Where to Draw the Line on Free Speech? Conscience in the Identity Politics Debate

On this morning's National Post website (February 18, 2017), there's a commentary piece with this headline: "Where to draw the line on free speech? It needs to be guided by judgment and conscience, not rules." The author, Andrew Coyne, raises some good points about mutual obligations in a democratic society such as Canada's. He points out that "the spirit of free speech" is important, that "free speech exists, as a legal guarantee, in part because of the foundation of social values in which it is embedded."

What the author doesn't address in his very reasonable piece about free speech is the underlying crisis our society currently faces with regard to conscience. Conscience -- the source of our ineffable and awe-inspiring courage and inner strength -- is quickly and efficiently being killed off in our society. Without conscience, we simply aren't able to understand our mutual obligations, let alone grasp the meaning of "the spirit of free speech." Without conscience, we don't have the courage to recognize and confront hatred. Without conscience, we stagger from crisis to crisis and hurl cliches instead of insight at complex issues. Without conscience, we can't hold the line against any of the philosophical movements designed to eradicate differences between individual human beings and our neighbours. Without conscience, we start to believe there's only one right way to be: our way or the highway.

In short, without conscience, people aren't able to be the loving and potential-filled individuals we're capable of being.

 

The foundation of social values in which "the spirit of free speech" resides is due in large part to the long arc of Christian values that have slowly evolved over the centuries. Despite a history riddled with Christian leaders who perpetrated mistakes and terrible abuses (some of which have been acknowledged and atoned for), one important aspect of Christianity (and Judaism before it) is the strong emphasis placed on women's worthiness before God. You can't have a fully functioning human conscience unless you're willing to trust that God does not place men above women in Creation or in human society. Shown here is "The Vision of the Blessed Clare of Rimini" by Francesco da Rimini (prob. about 1333-40), on display at the National Gallery, London, UK. Photo credit JAT 2023.

In place of conscience, without much awareness that what we're doing is dangerous to our longstanding sense of social values, we're tacking together a murky blend of laws, ideologies, logic, and dualistic right-and-wrong morality that currently masquerades under the noble banner of identity politics. Identity politics purports to be a salvific trend which will add to our foundation of judgment and conscience once we totally accept and absorb and see the wisdom of the myriad small but necessary laws that must be put in place -- just temporarily, of course -- to protect certain individuals who believe it's their RIGHT to never feel offended and never feel challenged in their personal beliefs. Identity politics is an ideology designed to give people permission to stop listening to their own conscience and to listen instead only to the System 2 pleasure and happiness networks of their own human brains. The strategy can be summed up in this way: if it gives you a brief neurological high, it's great; if it demands you do the hard work of understand and accepting your neighbour (or yourself!), it's not only awful and unfair, but should be made illegal.

We've seen its ilk before under other names, names such as fascism and totalitarianism and religious fundamentalism of all stripes. These philosophical movements may appear different in the specific political and economic laws they apply to their citizens, but one thing they all have in common is the methods used to eradicate conscience among their citizens. Once you kill off conscience in the majority your citizens, of course, you can do pretty much anything you like, as successful tyrants such as Stalin and Hitler and Pol Pot and Mao have shown us.

Regimes such as these -- along with many others now and in the past -- start by trumpeting their claims for Truth. (Obviously, they're not going to tell you it's really a Big Fat Lie.) Next they bombard you with a constant stream of words and speeches and polemical essays filled with countless "wisdom words" (e.g. peace, justice, liberty, equality, fraternity, sacredness, oneness) to try to force their way into the System 1 networks of your brain -- the networks that are responsible for important emotional and spiritual traits such as empathy, courage, trust, love, morality, fidelity, curiosity, patience, and openness to change. These networks are programmed to respond to cues around relationships and learning and purpose, so they're vulnerable to attack through heart-based words (as every spin doctor in history has figured out).

I should stop here and point out that System 1 (what we tend to call "the Heart") is one of two major processing streams used by the brain. The other is System 2 (what we tend to call "the Mind"). Researchers in Dual Process Theory, which posits the operation of two different yet equally important processing systems in the brain, are starting to see both the benefits and the pitfalls of having two brain systems with different priorities that can, under certain circumstances, start to compete with each other -- a problematic situation that all too many people today have experienced firsthand.

Once the non-empathetic but highly logical and fiercely dogmatic leaders of a ideological movement have forced their way into your brain's System 1 networks, they start to chip away at your own natural, built-in sense of self. They try to make you doubt your sense of self. They try to make you doubt that you should even have a sense of self. They try to force relativism on you and they try to force determinism on you (both at the same time!). They tell you there's no such thing as free will (i.e. a conscience through which you can apply your empathy and courage and other System 1 traits). They tell you that because people have no conscience and no free will, chaos will ensue and everyone will become traitorous and cannibalistic zombies who will attack you on the street and rape you and murder you if you don't obey your new leaders. (Of course, these things won't happen if you and your neighbours have a conscience and know how to use it, but what the heck, who needs the truth about conscience when they're shovelling out their Big Fat Lies?)

Once you start to believe these lies, your brain will start to rewire itself to reflect your new beliefs. (This is the principle of neuroplasticity at work, and it's the scientific reality that explains how ideologies can reshape your brain if you're not careful and if you're not paying attention to what you're putting in your brain.) Your brain will try to do what you've told it to do -- it will start to demolish network connections that deal with System 1 emotional and spiritual priorities, and it will try to strengthen connections in the cortical layers that deal with logic, rules, competitiveness, agreeableness, neuroticism, schadenfreude, status, and happiness (which is not the same thing as meaning or purpose). You'll turn yourself into a virtue-signalling member of a hive mind, or, as Star Trek writers describe it, a member of the Borg Collective, or, as Battlestar Galactica writers would say, a Cylon who's going backward instead forward in his or her relationship with Creation and God.

This doorway originally served the narthex of a 19th century Ontario church. Eventually the staircase that led to the door was entirely removed. You can still see the doorway, but you can no longer reach it. This is what can happen to your conscience if you allow System 2 ideologies to dominate your brain. You can still see the words that describe your conscience, but you can no longer access the feelings that accompany a fully functioning interior doorway to wisdom. The part of you that's supposed to express independent free will and conscience becomes all show without actual function. Feelings of depression and anxiety often soon follow. Photo credit JAT 2014.

After you've turned yourself into a member of the hive mind comes the worst part. Your ideological leaders, who with one hand have stripped your brain of its ability to "know where to draw the line," mercifully offer you with the other hand the blueprint you need in order to become a happy and productive member of society. It will be a pure System 2 blueprint, of course, with eradication of anything resembling free will, conscience, empathy, openness to change, plus all the rest of the amazing human traits you're truly capable of. The System 2 blueprint will be presented to you as a salvific act of self-transcendence intended to create more justice and more righteousness for the victims in your society. But really the blueprint is just about the need for certain System 2-dominant brains to compete, to gain power and status, and to take pleasure from the suffering of others who have lost their own ability to tell right from wrong. Tyrants thrive where human hearts suffer.

It's a form of spiritual rape. To enter somebody else's brain and intentionally try to strip away their core sense of self and their access to their own free will and conscience is an unspeakable act of violence.

If we really want to have a society that understands "the spirit of free speech" and the meaning of mutual obligations, we must do everything in our power to raise our children so their brains can process and balance both System 1 and System 2 priorities -- and be able to tell the difference between the two. Only when individuals grow, maintain, and cherish their personal sense of conscience can we act together to recognize tyranny in all its insidious forms.

Conscience is our true protection against tyranny.