Debating accomodationism and confrontationalism.

This is a reply to a thread on a Facebook discussion board, posted here to not clutter it up further.  The Stedman article in question is this:
The Problem with "Atheist Activism"


An article I linked to in reply is this:
The Alternatives to Confrontationalism


On to the discussion:


Me:
"I happily confront homophobia, racism, misogyny, religious bigotry, etc. Racism is a personal bugbear to me. My wife and I get dirty looks from whites and blacks, she being black, me being a honky. 

I don't single out Christianity, but since it is among the various sources of such intolerances, it goes on the list of things I have no truck with. The difference is that homophobia and the various other forms of hatred and intolerable (and intolerant) behavior needs to be confronted on their own only when they exist independent of other things."

Daryl:
"Religion is NOT the sourse of intolerances. Specifically racism is caused by oxytoxin (Carsten de Dreu et al) Religion plays the role of providing the justification forthe intolerance, but the intolerance is in the culture. If not religion condoning, then we would use some other mechanism, like a philosophy. "


Reply:
That's an oversimplification.  Oxytocin merely increases biased feelings already present in the subject.  "The intolerance is in the culture" is obvious.  Religion is a cultural phenomenon, one that has been and can be changed to modify the prevailing cultural values present in the world.  Of course there's always going to be some cultural institutions that have a certain degree of intolerance in the value structure they create, but when those crop up, we fight them, too.

Me:
"Confronting religion itself, when said religion is a source of multiple flavors of intolerance, is not only justified, it is more efficient tactically. Within Christianity specifically, for instance, there are scriptural justifications for a wide variety of different flavors of hate and oppression. Homophobia, yes, but also misogyny, racial hatred, justifications for slavery, intolerance for other faiths, etc."

Daryl:
"Paragraph 3, efficient tactically: Not true, Attacking the religion, not the intolerance, then the intolerance never gets dealt with. Attacking the intolerance you can have allies from within the religion, attack the religion, and all you get is enemies."

Reply:
I fight both.  I already said above that I target intolerance.  But I favor a systematic approach where you target intolerance, both direct acts of it and the systematic structures that justify it, religion being one of those.  Intolerance isn't the only problem with religion, if it were, then you might have a point.  But religion engenders other problems like relying on faith rather than reason, encouraging people to ask for intercessory aid from on high rather than enabling them to deal with their problems directly, etc.  

Me:
"All of the above are in scripture itself. If you want to add behaviors by religious institutions like the Catholic church, we can add a systematic and well documented conspiracy to conceal, cover up, and ENABLE child rapists to continue to perpetuate their crimes, internationally, and over the course of decades. So as to not single out the Catholics, we can include genital mutilation, practiced primarily on women by Muslim groups, and on males by Jewish groups."


Daryl:
"What do the scriptures have to do with christianity? The next time i see some family stoning their drunken son on the outskirts of town, a wife living in the shed during her period, Joel Osteen condeming rich men, or Pator Bill Tvelt renounce his endorsement of Bachman because of the book of Timothy, I will concern myself with what is in the bible. Christians don't, why should we? "


Reply:

The scriptures are cherry picked, but still believed in.  I just gave a few real world examples of harms done with scriptural justification.  Stoning still happens in parts of the world.  As does the previously mentioned genital mutilation.  Things like slavery are gone (or at least not globally accepted institutions) because society has already gone against the things justified by scripture and made them unacceptable.  I want to see that process continue.

Me:
"Islam does seem to me to be the worse offender, however, as there exist Muslim states where rape isn't a crime, but a punishment that women can be sentenced to. This is pathological at best, and even right this second I have to damn near physically restrain myself from following such a mention by a long stream of expletives. Even with that said, Islam is an immediate bad instance of what religious ideology leads to, all religious nonsense has to potential to go just as bad, it just needs the right circumstances."

Daryl:
"So do all muslims condone the actions in the most extreme islamic states? Do you see those kinds of activities in the muslim churches here in america? If we run around painting the whole of a religion with the most extreme actions of the most extreme faction, We end up sounding like the nut jobs."


Reply:
We don't paint the whole of a religion with the most extreme actions of the the most extreme faction, and neither do the bloggers that Stedman cherry-picked quotes from.  Stedman continuously makes the error that an attack on the religious doctrine itself is an accusation against every single member of it.  I am talking about a harmful set of ideas, not a war against a group of people.  It doesn't matter if not every member strictly adheres to the most pathological dictates of their doctrine, their subscription to it is a tacit endorsement of it.  The majority of citizens in fascist and Nazi countries in WWII weren't actively rounding up the Jews.  Some of them were ignorant of what was happening, and others suspected but took no action.  Others did take action.  By attacking the doctrines themselves, and pointing out the psychotic content contained within, we are undertaking the job of educating the ignorant about the stuff they should be aware of.  This can also encourage them into taking action against those who adhere to the same doctrine in name, but do decide to act on the more harmful aspects of it.  That is not just an Islam problem, it's a problem with any ideology, metaphysical, political or otherwise.

Me:
"I put the question to you: Should we atheists, and anyone else who object to such behaviors, waste our time targeting each of those crimes, these particular types of hate and intolerance individually? Even when we know that the authority for the existence of the institutions that justify such things are based on logical fallacies that are so obvious that even children can embarrass adult adherents of such faiths with innocent questions that the adults are unable to answer? I say no."


Daryl:
"Answer to your question, Yes we should. Because you can actually accomplish something that way."


Reply:
I agree.  I just don't agree that it's impossible to accomplish something the other way, either.  People can change when they come to realize that a philosophy they've adhered to is based on nonsense.  It's how many people become atheists, or evolve politically from more extreme positions.  It happens all the time, I simply encourage open dialogue about said problems.  I'm not advocating violent suppression of thoughtcrime, just unfettered and open conversation.


Me:
"You present me a religion that does not rely on unsupportable appeals to faith, presents a coherent ethical framework, and doesn't have a record of harmful behavior, but does provide a sense of community and collective ritual to honor particular social customs, and I will happily leave that religion alone, although I will probably question why it's called a religion in the first place."


Daryl:
"You can question why it's called a religion all you want. You will be wrong. Shit is shit, even when it doesn't stink."


Reply:
If a religion or any other ideology is shit, I feel it is so because of the attributes I just described.  If it doesn't have those, why is it still shit?  I think I gave a fair summation of the parts that are problematic.  


Me:
"Unfortunately, even the more benign religions in the real world like Buddhism and Jainism exhibit some of the more harmful behaviors I have previously enumerated, and they have to be at least reformed, if not abolished."


Daryl:
"So you are sympathetic to Buddism? Following your model, we should oppose buddism because in the 50's in tibet, the Dali Lama endorsed serfdom."


Reply:
I'm sympathetic to some of the philosophy contained in Buddhism, especially early Buddhism, before it had really developed the authoritarian structure of religion that various forms of it developed later.  Tibetan Buddhism, and in particular, the Dalai Lama's position as a theocratic head of state is opposed by me.  He has endorsed various positions that have led to violence between different schools and factions of Vajrayana Buddhism, murders have occurred, etc.  Buddhism as a religious institution has many of the same problems in other countries that I previously identified in relation to Christianity and Islam.  Even here in the states there have been Buddhist teachers that used their authority as "enlightened" teachers to take advantage of their students, in sexual and non-sexual ways.

None of that kind of behavior should be tolerated.  As I mentioned in paragraph 9 (included below for completeness), I'm sympathetic to modern, secular redactions of Buddhist thought, with all of the metaphysical nonsense stripped out.  I am not at all sympathetic to those parts of Buddhism that exhibit ANY of the behaviors I mentioned above.


Me:
"I myself am highly sympathetic to Buddhist thought, being rather fond of Sam Harris's thoughts on the subject, and a fan of Stephen and Martine Batchelor, amongst others in the burgeoning "secular" Buddhist movement, and I do my best to keep up a regular meditative practice and engage in serious contemplation of Buddhism's "Eight Noble Truths" as at least decent philosophical offerings, although I don't cheapen such conjectures with notions of metaphysical holiness."

Me:
"Since it will probably be brought up, when I do target Christianity, or any religion, my targets are the bad ideas contained within such ideologies. The rank and file members of Christianity, or any other religion, are generally good and decent people when one takes the time to get to know them. What needs to be confronted is the irrationality of faith itself, which holds members of religion in varying degrees of mental thrall.

Religious indoctrination is a willful manipulation, somewhere in the continuum between the parishioner in the pew and the pastoral heads of particular religions (I'm sure that there are some ministers who are true believers, hence why I paint it as a continuum), and boils down to mind control and totalitarian thinking."


The members of Christianity, or any other religion, are victims of the authoritarian structure they are enmeshed within, and the whole reason that religious institutions and clerics of said institutions piss me off is that they are parasites on those people. The whole reason to confront religion is to liberate the good people enslaved by false ideologies from the glorified con-artists somewhere in the authoritarian structure of their churches, if not their direct priests, ministers, and imams."


Daryl:
"Umm, no dude, that is so wrong. There is no master puppet master, pulling the strings, willfully manipulating people to follow his will. The menbers are not slaves. The leaders of the religion actually believe the stuff they are teaching (watch the HBO documentary, A question of miracles). "


Reply:
They're not slaves, but they are being manipulated.  I did say that there are ministers who believe, and that it was a continuum. It's not a conspiracy theory.  If a preacher gets up in church and preaches against gay marriage, for instance, he's going to influence the opinion of a certain proportion of his congregation, and they are going to adjust their behavior towards that issue politically when it comes time to vote.  Some ministers are going to do so because they honestly believe in the doctrines in the Bible that they are basing that view on, others are going to be in collusion with political figures to cynically encourage that their parishioners vote a certain way.  It doesn't matter whether they believe or not, or to what degree of control is involved, the manipulation occurs because the minister is an authority figure that the congregation is going to accept as delivering received wisdom to various degrees.  His authority and the authority of the text are based on demonstrably false information, and I see nothing wrong with pointing that out.  The texts contain lies.  Point out the lies, and at least some people who hear that will start to question the truthfulness of those doctrines, and they may be on their way out of religion.


Me:
"I disagree completely with your assessment of Zahn's reply. Zahn heard Stedman's anemic complaint quite clearly, she simply rejected it, as she should have."


Daryl:
"Then go back and read it again. Eventually it will sink in."


Reply:
I recommend you do the same.  I have.  


Me:
"Confront religion itself, because if you attack the foundations of unthinking faith that support all the injustices done in the name of various religions, you don't need to attack each particular injustice. Any behaviors that do turn out to be beneficial, and therefore worthy of preservation don't deserve to be sullied with the label of religion, because they are frankly superior."


Daryl:
"And finally, paragraph 13, attack the foundations, and you bang your head against a wall. You move nothing, and get a headache."


Reply:
This is demonstrably false.  Questioning the foundation of my own former belief structure is what led me to discard it.  There are plenty of others who have done likewise.  It's not going to happen quickly or in huge swathes of people, but it does happen everyday.  It's a long struggle, but one worth participating in, in my view.

The Memetics of Religion: Fundamentalism as a Parasitic Adaptation

Recently on Google+, I posted some Bible quotes with the caption, “Jesus, on Family Values”:
“If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.” — Luke 14:26

“And every one that hath forsaken houses, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or children, or lands, for my name’s sake, shall receive an hundredfold, and shall inherit everlasting life.”— Matthew 19:29

“Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword. For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law. And a man’s foes shall be they of his own household. He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.” — Matthew 10: 34 – 37"

One of the replies I got was:
"You can't even read these passages allegorically. How can these believers BS themselves into believing this crap?"

As I was replying, it got longer and longer, so I turned it into this essay.  While I was quoting from Christianity in my original post, I think that it applies to all religions.

I think part of the problem is that most don't believe this crap.  What we have are a bunch of different memes contending with each other for replication opportunities.

The first meme of importance is the moral meme.  The bearers of this meme are primarily focused on living a moral life according to standards that are designed to maximize well-being, treating others with kindness and charity, avoiding conflict, enjoying family time, etc.  We can shorthand this group of behaviors as “being moral”.  All of these behaviors have sound evolutionary reasons for existing, and many of the predecessors are readily observed in our fellow primates.  But the moral meme doesn’t usually exist on its own, it often combines with a doctrinal memeplex (large collection of memes) called religion.

The first branch retains much of the motivation of the ethical meme itself, and only partially adopts the religious memeplex.  These meme-bearers have vague notions of the myths and stories of their doctrine, but they haven't bothered to sit down and actually examine the doctrines that they purportedly believe in.  Being moral, from an outside observer's perspective, is what they actually care about and how they define themselves.  The problem is that even though it's apparent that their real focus is on being moral, they call that "being religious", and due to various other factors involved in the structure of the religion memeplex itself, they get "being moral" and "being religious" tied up in their heads so much that the two terms become inextricably intertwined.  For the purposes of this essay, we'll call this type of confusion the moderate meme.

Then we have the second group.  These meme-bearers aren't dedicated to “being moral”, they are actually dedicated to accepting the content of their doctrine as "truth".  That is how they define themselves.  This “truth” includes the actual moral content of the doctrine, the bits of the doctrine that correspond to a maximization of well-being, but also the assertions about how the universe functions, the petty prejudices of ages past (misogyny, racism, bigotry towards the sexually adventurous), as well as the literature content, et al.  This tendency to accept doctrine as “truth” we can shorthand as "being religious".  They also conflate "being moral" and "being religious", but for them, the prime concern is the acceptance, not the maximization of well-being.  We can call this type of confusion the fundamentalist meme.  

So we have two groups of meme-bearers, moderates and fundamentalists, both running around calling their memes by the same terms.  Worse, both the moderates and the fundamentalists consider that “being religious” and “being moral” define who they are as people, and they use both terms interchangeably and to refer to different behaviors.  But because they are using the same terms, they fool themselves into thinking that they are both working towards the same goals, and there ends up being memetic drift between the two groups.  The moderates, who are generally decent people, end up picking up on some of the doctrinal memes (the assertions about reality and petty prejudices) of the fundamentalists and feel obligated to believe in them too, because subscription to doctrine is a part of their "being religious" meme, even though it has a lower priority to them than "being moral".  You also get some fundamentalists with a certain amount of tendency towards maximizing well-being, because being moral in actuality is also part of the doctrine, even though it’s of lower priority.  Both of these crossover situations can cause cognitive dissonance when the underlying conflicts are pointed out.  As a defense against dissonance, there is often a strong reaction in the meme-bearer of either sort against processes that draw attention to the dissonance, like critical thinking procedures or investigative methodologies like scientific empiricism or historical analysis.

Scientific empiricism and historical analysis are memes too, of course, but the difference is that they are investigative memes, not religious memes.  Religious memes are about certainty, about knowing “truth”, whether it’s a moral truth or a truth about the way the universe is put together.  Investigative memes are about discovery.  Some of the products of those discoveries can be elevated to truths, and even turned into doctrines for religions (especially in the past), but the emphasis in the meme-bearer is on discovery, not truth, so as long as they can keep discovering, they don’t mind overturning yesterday’s truths, as long as the new discovery can do so via application of strict standards.  These meme-bearers define themselves as investigators, not as truth-possessors.  The source of conflict between the different classes of meme-bearers becomes obvious once one identifies the identity issues at stake.  The religious meme-bearers have their identities locked into a static “truth” position, and the investigation meme-bearers have their identities locked into a process of challenging static “truths”.

Keep in mind, this isn’t actual different tribes of people who possess only one meme or the other.  These memes are in everyone’s minds, influencing our behavior.  What does seem likely is that in any given person, certain memes are going to be more dominant in influence at any given time.  People in the real world are going to have multiple points of commitment to these memes and others with varying levels of intensity.  I’m necessarily simplifying to be illustrative.

Fundamentalist memes arise, I suspect, when investigative memes and moral memes combine and replicate.  The religions that exist in the world today seem to be a result of this type of interaction.  Investigative meme-bearers are today constantly producing models of the world which are then picked up and adopted as doctrines.  In the past when technology memes hadn’t progressed to the current level that they exist at today, it took a long time for investigative meme-bearers to produce new models.  This exerted a selection pressure that naturally favored fundamentalist memes, as the models had a seeming eternal “truth” aspect, since most meme-bearers of any type didn’t get the opportunity to observe the emergence of a new model.  Potential moderate meme-bearers would be fairly invisible in the general population, since there was no pressure to differentiate from fundamentalist meme-bearers.  So for centuries, fundamentalism was a decent survival strategy, as it could parasitize the investigative memes, and change happened slowly enough that fundamentalism, which is highly resistant to change, could adapt when necessary.

This all changed with the acceleration of technological know-how, and the gradual process of improvement and refinement that the investigative meme-bearers were always pursuing.  Even the old obsolete models were useful data, because it gave them a base to build on and improve.  As time goes by, new discoveries are made, and old discoveries that proved valid end up stronger.  So the foundations get more and more certain (although never 100%), and provide a wider and wider base to use as a launchpad for new discoveries.  The more time goes by, the more information is accumulated, the more the discovery methods improve and the faster new discoveries come in.  Unlike with biological genes, memetic evolution is Lamarckian as well as Darwinian, and enjoys an accelerated learning curve.

This is a problem for the survival of the fundamentalism meme, because it can no longer get nourishment from the relative stability of the “truths” thrown off by the investigative memes as they go about their work.  The selection pressure now favors memes that aren’t tied as strongly to doctrinal issues, since truths change so rapidly.  This is what has been allowing the moderate meme to assert its own identity, that of a religious meme focused on “being moral” in practice.

Now that we actually have moderates, things are improving, but it’s not all roses.  The problem is that the moderate meme-bearers still conflate “being religious” and “being moral”.  This keeps them believing in things that are demonstrably false, even if that belief is shallower than that of the fundamentalists.  It also leads them to make excuses for the hateful doctrinal material of the fundamentalists, which can cause dissonance on its own. 

Finally, this conflation often leads to prejudice amongst moderates against those who have untangled the semantic confusion of “being moral” and “being religious” by getting rid of the religion meme and retaining the moral meme.  This isn’t any one particular group, but a whole category of groups that generally err on the side of secular humanism.  It’s like the semantic confusion of “being religious" and "being moral" is an adaptation that the religious memes developed because the confusion does actually help the religious memes hold on longer in people's heads by inculcating the notion that without the doctrinal content of “being religious”, they would descend into immoral chaos.  The meme-bearers don't want to be immoral, and the meme fights against the realization that moral and religious can be separated.

The memetic warfare, therefore, is geared mainly at liberating the moderates from the religious memes.  There are many tactics in play at any given time.  There’s the frontal assaults on the religious doctrines themselves by the so-called “Four Horsemen,” Dawkins, Dennett, Harris and Hitchens, as well as others that fall under the rubric of the “New Atheists”.  There’s the historians like Jennifer Hecht and Susan Jacoby, doing valuable work illustrating the long history of philosophical skepticism and doubt about doctrinal hegemony, undercutting the religious memes’ efforts to assume a universality that has never existed.  There’s the scientist educators and populizers, Carl Sagan, NeilDeGrasse Tyson, Lawrence Krauss, out there explaining the fascinating discoveries of science in a more digestible but NOT dumbed down manner, and illustrating the awesomeness of the natural world.  The legal strike forces like the FFRF, AUSCS, and Eugenie Scott and the NCSE* in the courts fighting the efforts of fundamentalists to undermine science directly. There’s the artillery division of people like Penn & Teller and the Mythbusters making skepticism awesome in the popular imagination, one explosion (or bullet catch) at a time. 

Most important of all, however, is the infantry of the common everyday atheists, agnostics, and freethinkers.  Using the more gentle approach of things like the Atheist Out Campaign, raising consciousness via similar tactics as the gay liberation movement, causing direct cognitive dissonance in the prejudiced by letting the religious meme-bearers know that not only can one be good without god(s), like the billboards and buses say, but that they already know good moral people who happen to be free of the religious memes, they’ve just been concealing their irreligion because of the intolerance.

I think we need all of these combatants in this memetic war.  Some are going to rub people the wrong way, but for others, it’ll be just what they need to hear.  It’s a war on many fronts, and requires many different strategic and tactical approaches, just as the memes we’re combating have their own multifaceted approach.

The good news is that signs seem to indicate that there is real progress being made.  Survey after survey is coming out that shows that the fastest growing “religious” group in the country (adjusted for immigration) are those marking “none” as their preference.  More and more people raised religious are moderating or leaving their faiths, and becoming more tolerant of those without religion, focusing more on just living good, moral lives.  I think that the reason we see so much more craziness from the fundamentalists who are left is that the more morally focused are leaving that kind of religion and leaving behind a precipitate of concentrated doctrinal crazy.  These people still need to be fought against on the memetic battleground, and many of those skirmishes are bloody.  But while it’s not certain, I think that a case can be made that as with the trend Steven Pinker points out about violence decreasing over time**, I think a case can be made for a similar trend with superstition and toxic religious faith.  I think generally those bearing the memes of science, critical thinking, and rationality are winning globally, and we should remember that when things look grim, while also remaining vigilant in the face of victory.

*FFRF – Freedom From ReligionFoundation, AUSCS – Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, NCSE– National Center for Science Education

**The Better Angels of Our Nature,2011.

New Houston Secular Buddhist Group

For anyone in Houston reading my blog and interested in secular buddhism, I just created a networking page on Facebook as my attempt to get something going.  Check it out if you're interested:

Houston Secular Buddhists

The Four Noble Truths and the Three Marks of Existence.

So what, after all, does Buddhism actually entail?  The philosophical tenets of Buddhism can be summed up with what it calls the 4 noble truths and the three marks of existence.  What follows is my own understanding of these “truths”.

1.  Sapient beings experience dissatisfaction.
2.  Dissatisfaction arises from craving, be it things, sensations, etc.
3.  Craving ceases when one realizes that everything is impermanent.
4.  One can realize the impermanence of everything by following the Eightfold Path.

I have used the word dissatisfaction because it seems to be a more accurate translation of the actual word, dukkha, than the more commonly used "suffering."  Suffering has a connotation of pain, and while that is related to dissatisfaction, it's not precise enough.  Dissatisfaction itself is pretty obvious, I think, it's a state of not being content with what one has.  This is seen most often when one contemplates unpleasant experiences, but it also happens with pleasant ones.  It's not that pleasant experiences are an illusion or that they aren’t actually pleasant.  It’s that they contain the seeds of dissatisfaction when one forgets that they, like the unpleasant experiences, are impermanent.  The good, the bad, there is no eternal.  There's nothing actually grim about this, it's just a fact of the universe.  It's part of the reality of everything being in flux, as I mentioned in my last post.  The fact of impermanence (annica) is neutral, but we humans have a habit of forgetting it, of craving (tanha) for the eternal, of expecting things to last forever.  This is what causes our sense of dissatisfaction with the universe we live in, and causes us to seek artificial illusions of permanence in things like religion, politics, superstition, drugs, hedonism, and all kinds of other diversions.  

None of these things are necessarily bad in and of themselves, what’s bad about them is the part of them that feed our self-delusion, the part that tricks us into thinking that they might last forever.  We spend so much time craving an eternity that doesn’t exist, and that keeps us from fully enjoying the pleasant experiences when they are going on and also wallowing in the fear of eternal suffering when we are in the midst of an unpleasant experience that will subside sooner or later.  

Siddhattha Gotama realized this somewhere around 2500 years ago.  “Buddha” is not a name, but a title.  It comes from the word bodhi, which is usually translated “enlightenment”, but really means awakened.  Buddha means “the awakened one”, someone with awareness, who notices and understands things.  He’s not a god, not a wizard, not any kind of supernatural entity, as later traditions portray him.  

Sid was just a guy who did the hedonistic thing and then spent years after doing the ascetic thing, pursuing spiritual fulfillment and attainment.  He finally realized that neither hedonism or asceticism were satisfactory, so he kicked back under a tree for a while until he realized that we humans sure spend a lot of time chasing after bullshit, and we don’t really need to do that.  Once he awoke to this realization, he decided he wanted to help others realize it too.  But what exactly is it that he realized?

Sid realized that we lie to ourselves constantly about the truths of reality, which is made up of the three marks of existence.  I’ve already mentioned two of the marks, impermanence and dissatisfaction.  The third is not-self (anatta).

In the Indian Vedic religion, there is a concept of an unchanging, permanent soul, called atman.  It’s kind of like a form, in the Platonic sense.  The idea is very similar, for things to exist, there needs to be an ideal in some other realm for it to be a reflection of, otherwise there would be nothing.  Sid rejected this notion due to his recognition of impermanence and of applying it to the very concept of self itself, plus the fact that no one can directly observe a form.

This isn’t actually that hard to figure out.  As with all things, we change and evolve over time.  We gain new knowledge, we forget things, we change deeply held convictions.  The me that exists today is very different from the me that existed when I was 7 years old.  The me that exists today is different than the me from yesterday in many respects, and the me that exists in 20 years will be more different still.  You can’t step in the same river twice, the ship of Theseus, grandfather’s axe, and other similar philosophical notions are related.  So there is not a permanent self, there is a continuous process of becoming the new self, which goes on to become a new self, etc, from moment to moment (this process is called punabbhava, or just bhava, often incorrectly translated as rebirth).  Now, in the Vedic religion that was dominant in Sid’s time, this was a supernatural notion related to transmigration of souls and reincarnation, and to be fair, Sid didn’t really bother dismissing it as nonsense, he just figured it was unimportant, since the same process goes on within someone’s life, and he was nothing if not focused on trying to help people live better lives.  

The reason not-self is an important concept is that the popular notion of the self is made up of 5 aggregate attributes and those are causes of craving, but I will go into those in another post.  The point is that Sid developed the eightfold path as a way to help people realize the causes of dissatisfaction, realize the impermanent nature of things, and to help them stop grasping at illusions.  

Next post, the eightfold path, and possibly the 5 aggregates.

Atheism, Naturalism, and Buddhism.

ATHEIST


The biggest confusion that always crops up in discussion is that atheists believe there is no god.  People like to call us intellectually dishonest, because you can't disprove the existence of god.  My reply, always, is "Of course you can't disprove god."  We don't try to disprove god because that's impossible; we can and do gleefully destroy the logical fallacies and bad arguments for the existence of god, gods, or the supernatural.  We show that the specific claims about the attributes of some gods are false.  Genesis, for example: science has demonstrated that life emerged through natural processes, as did the universe itself, although we're still working out the finer details.  So for someone who believes in the Christian god because they believe the Genesis account, it can be shown to them that that's a bad reason to believe in the God of Genesis.  The same goes for pagan gods as the source of natural phenomena like lightning, rain, storms, etc. Those gods, as best we can tell, seem to have been developed in order to explain those things, and when we have a better way to explain the phenomena, their necessity drops away.  It doesn't disprove their existence, however.  Anyone can come up with all kinds of theories about why gods might exist.  Here's one:  Gods pop into existence as the result of the collective psychic potential of people believing in them.  Occultism is full of notions like that and similar, and I used to justify my own belief in the supernatural that way.  It's a nonsense proposal, because the notion that belief can cause something to manifest has no evidence for it either, even though it doesn't assume a supernatural cause for the universe.  At best, it's an argument for memetics and their influence on human culture, not for a supernatural realm, and it's still at the mere hypothesis stage, needing confirmation.  But the point is that even if one eliminates the explanatory power that the gods used to hold, that doesn't rule out their existence as a point of fact.


To rule out existence entirely, one would have to search all of time and space, which we can't do.  On the other hand, proving the existence of a deity is relatively easy, a godlike entity can show up and present evidence of its own existence any time it likes if it does in fact exist (and it can avoid Oolon Colluphid and Babel fish).  This is why when people accuse atheists of having faith that there is no god, gods, or the supernatural, I'm always careful to specify myself as an agnostic atheist, and to clarify that when it comes down to it, most atheists are.  I admit to an outside possibility that a god might quit screwing around and present itself at some point.  But until that happens or any other type of evidence is presented, I have no reason to believe in any of them, hence, I'm an atheist, I have no belief in gods.  I have no belief in the existence of other things for which there is no evidence, either, so sometimes I use the word skeptic to be more inclusive, but atheist is usually sufficient.  I come into contact with more people who care about the existence of gods specifically than the other stuff.  


There's so many labels that fit me.  Skeptic.  Atheist.  Humanist.  Agnostic.  Epicurean.  Naturalist.  Shit-stirrer (that's nothing new).  The newest one that seems to fit, Buddhist, is funny given the others, but I'll get to that in a bit.  The problem with atheism is that it's narrow, it focuses only on what I am against, it doesn't say anything about what I'm for.  That's the topic of the rest of this article.


One of my online friends made an offhand comment the other day:  "I don't believe in the supernatural, I think the natural world is super."  That pretty much nails it for me.  Some people like to disparage those who don't believe in the supernatural, calling them materialists.  I am a materialist, but I think people like to conflate that word.  There's the economic materialist who views consumption and acquisition of goods as a good thing.  Then there's the philosophical notion who views everything as being made of matter.  Too many people seem to like to apply the oft-held disdain for the economic materialist to the philosophical materialist.  It's a word game.  To avoid it, I call myself a naturalist, since that's a better fit anyway.  What does a naturalist do?  Well, I'll tell you.


I contemplate the vastness of the universe and the scales involved, from the sub-atomic quark level and how much goes on there.  I think about the vast distances between objects in our own solar system, the distances between our solar system and our nearest neighbors.  I think about the vast amount of systems in our own galaxy and how many galaxies we can see out there, let alone how many exist.  I think about the growing possibility that even the immense totality of our own universe may be a single one in an even huger multiverse with whole universes popping into existence here and there every time we indirectly observe a black hole.


I contemplate the scales of time involved for galaxies and systems and stars and planets to form, the geological time scales involved in taking us from pre-organic molecules to complicated organisms, and the fact that it took billions of years even to get to those basic molecules even before life got going.  I think about how all of the component parts of everything we see on earth were born in the hearts of exploding supernovae.  How millions of years of evolution can take a single species and turn one branch into a T-Rex, and another into a peacock.  How thanks to a massive meteor or asteroid impact in the Yucatan 65 million years ago, we ourselves and all the other mammals were able to develop from small rodent like creatures dodging T-Rex footprints into one of the dominant families of organisms on the planet.  I think about how environment determines form, such as in the way whales and other cetaceans originally evolved from a wolf like looking creature that originally lived much of its life in water, like hippos do today.


I contemplate all of this and marvel at how it all fits together in so many vast combinations, constantly in flux and impermanent.  Everything is constantly adapting and mutating fractally on different time and distance scales.  Nothing is fixed, nothing is stable, everything flows stochastically from the smallest neutrino to the largest cluster of galaxies and everything else in between.  I see all of this and I elate in the fact that I'm here to see it, along with probably countless other species throughout the multiverse.  It's unlikely that we'll get to share that experience with them any time soon due to the distances in space and time involved, but it's sheer arrogance and ego to assume that in all of that vastness we would be the only ones to be able to enjoy it.  To me, if anything is going to be covered by the notions of "holy" or "sacred", it's this contemplation of reality and all that it entails, and even using that religious language seems insufficient due to the petty and parochial concerns of so much of religion.  In the face of all of that, there's an epiphany about how very cosmically insignificant we really are, and I find that incredibly liberating.


Don't get me wrong.  Some people might get all morose about this kind of thing, but that kind of nihilistic despair just doesn't bother me at all.  There doesn't seem to be anything out there that is disapproving of our ethical decisions, or what kinds of fashion we wear, or people we associate with.  Even if there were something like a god, what are the odds it would even bother to notice us or single us out as more deserving of punishment or reward than anything else?  All of the pressures that religion likes to try to put on us are irrelevant.  We don't need to worry about the external forces, even the natural ones, because they're going to do what they do.  What really matters, when one has a full realization of our actual place in the cosmos, is how we treat ourselves and each other here on this pale blue dot.


And this brings me to my recent exploration of Buddhism.


In Jennifer Michael Hecht's book Doubt, A History, she talks about various systems that are kind of between a religion and a philosophical school as commonly understood. She calls these "graceful life philosophies."  What a GLP is focused on is a philosophical approach to how one should live one's life.  They may or may not include propositional beliefs about the world or universe, but they do seem to share the fact that whether they have them or not, they are much more focused on the process of living one's life, not accepting the propositional belief.  Hecht uses the Cynics, Stoics, and Epicureans as some of the western examples, and the earliest forms of Buddhism as an eastern one, along with Confucianism and Taoism, Taoism to a somewhat lesser extent.  Over time, the western ones have pretty much died off, and the eastern ones have all pretty much transitioned to full religions, with all the superstition, unfalsifiable beliefs, and authoritarian structures that that implies.


I have no use for religion.  But I like the idea of the graceful life philosophy (GLP).  I think when I went from my initial stage of atheism at an early age to paganism and occultism, what I was really looking for was a GLP.  I have some sympathies with Cynicism, Stoicism, and Epicureanism and have for a while. I'm much more Epicurean lately in comparison to my past flirtations with Cynicism and Stoicism, especially when I account for Epicureanism's history as a synonym for atheism.  Its long association with Democritus' atomism and its opposition of supernaturalism and focus on ending suffering and its conception of pleasure as the greatest good also helps.  Epicureanism is often slandered as hedonism in the materialistic sense, but the early Epicureans focused on moderation in all things, seeking to increase pleasure by increasing their understanding of the natural world and the self, and realized that by limiting the degree to which they allowed their desires to control them, they could maximize the pleasure of existence.  Which is a perfect transition to Buddhism.


How does one get back to Buddhism the graceful life philosophy, rather than what it is in so many places today, Buddhism the religion?  Owen Flanagan, author of The Bodhisattva's Brain: Buddhism Naturalized, has this to say in the introduction of that book:


"Imagine Buddhism without rebirth and without a karmic system that guarantees justice ultimately will be served, without nirvana, without bodhisattvas flying on lotus leaves, without Buddha worlds, without nonphysical states of mind, without any deities, without heaven and hell realms, without oracles, and without lamas who are reincarnations of lamas. What would be left? My answer is that what would remain would be an interesting and defensible philosophical theory with a metaphysics, a theory about how we come to know and what we can know, and an ethics, a theory about virtue and vice and how best to live.  This philosophical theory is worthy of attention by analytical philosophers and scientific naturalists because it is deep. Buddhism naturalized, if there is or can be such a thing, is compatible with the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution and with a committment to scientific materialism. Such a total philosophy, again if there is or could be such a thing that could be credibly called "Buddhist" after subtracting what is psychologically and sociologically understandable, but that is epistemically speaking incredible superstition and magical thinking, would be what I call "Buddhism naturalized," or something in its vicinity. Such a theory might shed light on the human predicament, on how finite material beings such as human animals fit into the larger scheme of material being. Because such a theory would speak honestly, without the mind-numbing and wishful hocus pocus that infects much Mahayana Buddhism, but possibly not so much early Theravada Buddhism, Buddhism naturalized, if there is or can be such a thing, delivers what Buddhism possibly uniquely among the world's live spiritual traditions, promised to offer: no false promises, no postive illusions, no delusions. False self-serving belief, moha, is a sin for Buddhists."


There's several different types of Buddhism in the world today. Theravada, Mahayana, Tibetan (Tantric), as well as multiple variations within those categories, like Zen.  Zen certainly does have less of the mythological accretions that the rest of Mahayana does, though Zen itself is a subset of Mahayana. Zen still does retain a smattering of notions like rebirth and karma, it just doesn't accentuate them nearly as much. 


In addition to Flanagan's book, which I am still in the beginning of, I've been listening to a lot of talks by Stephen Batchelor, and reading some of his books.  I just finished his Confession of a Buddhist Atheist, and have listened to the audiobook version of his Buddhism Without Beliefs, the longer book version of which is next in my reading queue after Flanagan.


Stephen Batchelor's approach is that he takes all of the stuff that pre-existed Buddhism like the supernatural elements and strips them out, keeping only the stuff that Gotama himself taught. Gotama did mention stuff like reincarnation, but it was part of the historical culture that Gotama existed in, and it's not actually necessary to believe in that kind of stuff for the tenets of Buddhist philosophy and practice to make sense or be useful. Basically, it, along with karma and various other things that do exist in the early Buddhist materials are analogous to the few propositional beliefs that Cynicism and Stoicism contain, they're there, but they're not the focus.  The difference between Flanagan and Batchelor is that Batchelor is a former monk of the Tibetan and Zen traditions, whereas Flanagan is a neuroscientist and philosopher.  Both, however, along with various others, seem to be calling for a form of Buddhism that more fits Hecht's terminology of the GLP, and that's what interests me in particular. The result ends up being very much a form of secular humanism with more emphasis on contemplative practice, and that's right up my alley.


This has been long enough, so I'm going to post it now.  I will followup shortly with my understanding of the philosophical tenets of Buddhism.

What a fool this mortal's been: Part 6.

Down the Rabbit Hole and Out Again.

Every summer in high school I worked summers at a Boy Scout camp near San Marcos, El Rancho Cima.  My third summer there, between Junior and Senior years of high school, I became a pagan.

I know it's kind of an odd place for it to happen, considering how conservative and Christian the BSA is as an institution, but it's full of high school kids, and there's a lot who do not tow the line.  I also got drunk and high for the first time while working at camp, but those are different stories.

Anyway, that particular summer I made friends with a guy named Brian H. who hadn't worked there in previous years.  He was a Wiccan.  As he explained to me, that meant that rather than the kind of church I was used to, his religion was all about nature, with a God and Goddess, which were balanced more than the single father god of Christianity.

This blew my mind.  I asked him about the Greek gods, and he explained to me that the various pagan gods of all cultures were aspects of the God and Goddess, like different masks that they would wear for the benefit of the different needs of different cultures.  The gods were distinctive spirits that were different personalities of the cosmic all, the life force that made up the universe, divided into God and Goddess for balance, light and dark, yin and yang, but not good and evil, since both had their good and evil sides, like we humans did.  The best part was that he also told me that magic was real, and through ritual we could make things happen, either ourselves, or by asking the gods to intervene for us.  They just asked for offerings of juice or food, left out for them.  He explained that of course the offerings would be eaten by animals or whatnot, but that was ok, since animals were part of nature, and since the gods were of nature, they'd get it.

To me, this was fantastic.  I had been reconciled to the fact that Greek religion was dead, that no one actually worshipped the pagan gods anymore.  Now not only did I find out that I could worship the Greek gods if I wanted to, I could worship ALL of the gods.  They were all real in some way.  He recommended that if I wanted to find out more, there were books I could check out.  Well, as established, I didn't need to be told twice.

That weekend when we went into town, I found Living Wicca: A Further Guide for the Solitary Practitioner by Scott Cunningham at Hastings, so I snatched it up and devoured it.  It was a sequel, apparently, but that didn't seem to matter.  Apparently I didn't need much, just some candles, incense and some Fruitopia that I saved for a libation.  I lit the candles and incense (sandalwood, which I still like) and said a short little prayer dedicating myself to Athena, always my favorite goddess, being both an awesome warrior and a goddess of wisdom.  And so it began.

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I was having a good time.  I enjoyed the hell out of ritual, especially on the occasion when it seemed to work, sometimes with disastrous consequences.  For instance, I was requested to conduct a ritual to help relieve stress in one of my friends by his wife, and as a result, he quit his job.  I was a bit shocked he would do something like that, but he ended up going back to school, and eventually becoming a teacher, so it worked out in the end.  Now, of course, I don't see any real significance to the ritual.  If he was stressed out enough at work that his wife would request my help, it's not much of a stretch to predict he was on the verge of quitting anyway.  There were plenty of other rituals I did that were either for goals so vague that it was impossible to nail down a result, or simply didn't produce anything at all.  No one ever said that every ritual worked, however, sometimes the gods just didn't want to help.  They were well known to be fickle, so it was easy to shrug off the misses.

I was starting to waver on the whole religion angle, however.  Try as I might, and as relatively benign as they were, I just couldn't really believe in the God and Goddess, or the literal existence of any of the other gods.  I had good evidence (HA!) that magic itself worked, and frankly I was more interested in that anyway.  I had heard rumors amongst the other pagans that I knew of something called ceremonial or high magic which was supposed to be the advanced stuff, and really overly complicated.  Most of them shunned it, preferring the relative simplicity and innocence of paganism, but unlike them, I had no real sense of devotion to the gods.  I was much more interested in getting things done.  In essence, I wanted power, and I also wanted more structure in ritual.  Pagan ritual was kinda rough around the edges and while it had its good parts, it didn't have enough in the way of formal robes and other costumes, fancy symbols on the walls or altar, and not enough fancy jewelry.  High magic had all that in spades, so deeper down the rabbit hole I went.

I started with Modern Magick by Donald Michael Kraig.  His book is a great intro to the subject, kind of a high magic equivalent of the book I replaced Cunningham with, The Complete Book of Witchcraft by Raymond Buckland, otherwise known as Uncle Bucky's Big Blue Book.  This was exactly what I needed.  It was constructed in 11 lessons, starting out with basic relaxation and visualization exercises, moving on to elemental weapon construction and banishing rituals, up to evoking angels and demons and charging them to accomplish tasks for you via symbols engraved on medallions, looking up the equipment needed for ritual in tables of correspondence to make sure you had the right elemental, planetary, and zodiac colors, incenses, etc.

Ritual magic is a beautiful system of nested heirarchies seemingly specifically designed to keep a certain kind of mind highly entertained while accomplishing absolutely nothing at all.  It was my kind of mental masturbation.  I went from Kraig's primer to the hard stuff, Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn rituals, on to Aleister Crowley's Thelema, all the time the rituals and symbolism getting more sophisticated and complicated and the meaning more and more arcane.  Crowley's motto for his publication The Equinox was "The Method of Science, the Aim of Religion".  For years, I was fooled into thinking that was what I was doing.

It wasn't all bad, of course.  Buried in this pile of Arcana are some genuine pearls of wisdom.  I still find Crowley's Liber Oz to be one of the most succinct and elegant statements on freedom ever written.  Crowley does encourage one on many, many occasions to be skeptical of one's own results, and to document everything one does in one's magical diary so that they have a record of past results to compare present ones to, and to revisit past insights to re-examine assumptions when new info comes in, etc.  He even put various traps in his works meant to trip up those who weren't as disciplined in their approach to magick as Crowley would like.  Obviously as the founder of a religion and someone who regarded themselves as a Prophet of a New Aeon (the Aeon of Horus, the forerunner of the newager's Age of Aquarius) he was still a bit of a supernaturalist, but he made a greater effort than others I was familiar with, and I have to give credit to Crowley for being one of several sources within occultism itself that put me on the path that eventually led me out of it.

Ceremonial magick was all well and good, but as with paganism before it, it was getting tiresome.  I still liked the fancy rituals, but my success rate from workings was no better than it had been before, and nothing seemed to do anything to improve it.  This is around the time that I found chaos magic.

Chaos magic was to ceremonial magick as Black Flag is to Pink Floyd.  It's loud, it's brash, it's punk as hell, and it has no use for centuries of tradition, it just wants to get down to business.  You don't need all that planetary bollocks, you can make up your own symbol systems on the fly.  Chaos magick primarily uses sigils based on the methods of Austin Osman Spare, a former associate of Crowley's who was a celebrated artist at the beginning of his career, and gradually descended into obscurity and poverty.  He did fantastic art that prefigured a lot of the surrealists, but he also had his own system of magic.  His notion was that one could write out a statement of intent, such as I WISH TO POSSESS THE STRENGTH OF A TIGER, and then craft a sigil out of the letters.  Here's an example of some of Spare's sigils:

One then takes the sigil, focuses on it while putting oneself into a trance state (called gnosis) and the theory goes that by doing this, one's subconscious is able to get the magic done for the chaos magician without all that pesky awareness and anticipation getting in the way.  Chaos magicians often banish by laughing at themselves after engaging in such an act, because it's patently ridiculous to expect to achieve results this way, and taking oneself too seriously is what ceremonial magicians do.

Chaos magicians also engage in a practice called paradigm shifting.  What this entails is that you do everything you can to put yourself into a different mindset than your natural one, if you're a Republican, try to think like a Democrat, if you subscribe to Fortean Times, go read the Skeptical Inquirer for a while.  The idea is to transcend the idea of the self, and to realize that you are a collection of conditioned reflexes and habits, in all that you do, and paradigm shifting is a way of attempting to hack your own self-illusions and come out the other side a more well-rounded person.  I still consider this kind of thing a valuable exercise to engage in periodically, myself.  There's no real supernatural bullshit attached to it, it's a good way to broaden one's perspective.  So again, while the results of my sigil activities were still stuck at the same success rate as before, little to none, and nothing that couldn't be explained via coincidence or selective attention, I was continuing to become more skeptical, while still practicing magic.  But my magical practice was becoming less and less about supernatural forces and entities and more about ways of fucking with my own head, to break myself out of my illusions.  For this, even more than chaos magic, I have a huge debt that I owe to Robert Anton Wilson.

Robert Anton Wilson is the guy who wrote the Illuminatus! Trilogy with Robert Shea back in the 70s, the greatest conspiracy novel ever written as far as I'm concerned.  It's a huge piece of ontological anarchist agitprop that starts out as a crime novel, quickly wraps itself deeply in the lore of various conspiracy theories, and goes on to simultaneously champion and mock pretty much all of the sacred cows of the occult, the new age, the UFO heads, the Kennedy assassination theorists, and every possible fringe group one can think of, and many that one can't.  If you haven't ever read it, I highly recommend it, although upon first reading it tends to make one's head spin.  It's like a Mannlicher-Carcano bullet made of LSD-25 ricocheted into your perceptions, and was exactly what I needed.

Wilson, both in Illuminatus! and his other works like Prometheus Rising and Cosmic Trigger advocates militant agnosticism about EVERYTHING.  Everything we interact with passes through many filters before the signal is eventually interpreted by our brains and then propagated to our conscious awareness.  These filters include both the physical organs that transmit the signals themselves and the various cognitive biases that we use to interpret information.  So often, we filter out what we don't expect to see, or manufacture things that we do want to or expect to see.  Anyone who's undergone this Basketball Test has had this demonstrated to them.  Wilson would conduct tests where he had two people come into a room, one would stab the other, and afterwards leave.  Wilson would ask how many people saw the knife, usually getting a lot of them to agree, only to have the the "knife" revealed as a banana.

In Prometheus Rising, Wilson offers an exercise early on in the book.  He says that if nothing else, this exercise, done long enough, will pay for the price of the book.  As you go about your day, think about quarters.  Visualize yourself finding quarters lying on the ground.  When you actually do this exercise, as I have, lo and behold, you will find quarters all over the place.  The question is, did you make the quarters appear, or did you find them because you had primed yourself to look for them by thinking about them?  Wilson's point is that all of us use various webs of expectation and prejudice to deal with the world we live in.  He calls these maps, and reminds us not to confuse the map for the territory.  Question all assumptions, all assertions, and always remember to question your own maps most of all.  Allow for the possibility of all things to be true, because you never know.

So between chaos magic and Wilson's model agnosticism, I was a lot more skeptical than I had been for a long time, but still, there was a problem.  The problem with being agnostic about everything is that it leads to a kind of solipsistic existence, where you're not sure about anything ever.  Basically, questioning is good, but you can't really get to a point where you know anything.  Wilson shoots himself in the foot in this manner by being too willing to uncritically accept certain types of claims.  He ends up justifying some aspects of Christian Science in some places because rather than the placebo effect being what it is, a useful effect to test the effectiveness of real medicine, he confuses it for something that can be relied upon to heal people via mind over matter thinking.  Wilson even wrote a whole book on CSICOP called The New Inquisition because of his inability to recognize that agnosticism is only the beginning position of the search for knowledge, not the end point.

Eventually I joined the Temple of Set while still retaining a lot of my agnostic positions.  I had a good time, met a lot of great people, and participated in a lot of fun, but again, the actual tangible results of my magical work were negligable.  I don't feel the need to go into too much depth about the Temple here, because it's not especially relevant to this tale of my journey from paganism to skepticism.  Perhaps in another post sometime.  I do mention it, however, because the Temple did provide me with the tool that eventually led to my leaving the organization and having the epiphany that allowed me to finally drop my attachment to the supernatural.

The Temple of Set has a huge, multi-category reading list full of books on a wide variety of subjects from ancient philosophy to history to political science to psychology and satanism (it being an offshoot of the Church of Satan) and a plethora of other interesting subjects.  Buried in that massive list is The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, by Carl Sagan.

I don't know who got it put on the list, but whoever he or she is, I thank them profusely.  I already knew who Carl Sagan was, of course, I'd seen and read Contact, I'd seen bits and pieces of Cosmos, and seen him on tv a lot growing up, talking about science.  He was one of the people who when I saw them on a show, I always stopped and watched, because it was going to be good.  I may have been a pagan and an occultist, but I never got rid of the love of science I had engendered in me early on, as covered in the early posts in this series.  I had never heard of this book, and I dutifully bought it on one of the many shopping trips I made to add to my collection of Temple reading list books.  Unfortunately, it ended up sitting on my shelf for years, unread, until I finally got around to it.

A year or so before I left the Temple, my active participation wound down to barely anything, simply due to other people being busy with their own lives and whatnot, and I wasn't doing much magic anymore anyway.  I was spending most of my time working and dealing with the back problem (herniated disc) exacerbated by work.  At some point, I came across The God Delusion in a bookstore, and I figured I'd check it out.  I knew Dawkins from The Selfish Gene which I had bought years ago as a chaos magician because I was interested in memetics.  The memetics section was the only part I'd read (I've since read it multiple times, and I'm considering pursuing biology as a result, but that's another story).  I'd also seen The Root of All Evil and liked it.  Ever since the experiences when I was younger, I either didn't believe in God or I wished he was real so I could kill him, so Dawkins riffing on JHVH and the Christians, Muslims and Jews was just fine with me.  So I read The God Delusion happily, got a big kick out of it without really considering it relevant to my own odd perspective on the supernatural, and when I finished, I was looking for something else in that vein.  I ended up finding Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens, and I read and re-read their stuff over and over.  Eventually, I decided that since the Temple wasn't doing much for me anymore, it was time to leave, so I emailed them politely that I was resigning.  

Curiously, after resigning, I actually felt a brief resurgence of magical enthusiasm, and I started to reengage with a strain of magick I had enjoyed, early hermetics based in Graeco-Roman Egypt, Alexandria specifically, in the early Christian era.  As I was researching neo-Platonism again and working up an alternate Greek Qabalistic Tree that I was going to create, I was still engaged with reading the atheist books.  I had also been introduced to the Point of Inquiry podcasts shortly before I left the Temple when Don Webb, a former High Priest of the Temple was interviewed, and I was working my way through the backlog of episodes.  After hearing Harris and Dawkins interviewed, I picked up and re-read The God Delusion in audiobook, and when I was done, I recalled that Dawkins had quoted from Carl Sagan in the book, and my eye fell upon The Demon-Haunted World.  Time to read that.

This was exactly what I needed.  Sagan broke it down, again and again, exactly what I had felt was missing from my Wilsonian agnosticism.  I didn't have to be satisfied with my solipsistic illusions.  There were ways of finding out the truth.  From the Dragon in my Garage to the baloney detection kit and beyond, this was exactly the shot in the brain I needed.  I applied the critical thinking skills I got from that book to my own residual superstitions.  My conception of deity was indistinguishable from an invisible dragon in the garage.  My own seldom effective magick was a mix of cognitive biases, wishful thinking, and placebo effect.  I recognized in depth a lot of the same behaviors described within the book in myself and my fellow occultists.  

Carl Sagan basically handed me the tools to recognize that I had spent the last 17 years or so telling myself comforting lies and fantasies, and that I didn't have to do it anymore.  I was free.  Finally, I was free.