The way some people see spirituality is as a definition of their goals that justify their methods.

I see it as a limitation on methods, and total freedom in setting your own goals.

Let’s see what this actually means. For starters, it means that I don’t see God as a goal, I see God as a way. To me, God is not on some glorious throne in the heavenly kingdom of far, far away. God is between every two atoms, and yet he is the “hardware” that runs this and all other Universes. God is the layer zero of all reality, the fundamental reality compared to which everything else is some kind of an illusion.

The nature and character of God is sat-cit-ananda, or, in rough translation, reality-consciousness-bliss. In order to be closer to God, you need to be closer to his nature, you need to be closer to sat-cit-ananda, you need to be made of it and you need to manifest it in others. This limits your means, but it doesn’t limit your goals; it’s essentially what St. Augustine meant by “love, and do what you will”. In this understanding, God doesn’t tell you what to do, he is the way you do things. God doesn’t order you to be kind, God is the special type of kindness that you manifest. In some cases, God is the destruction of some things in order for them not to stand in the way, and to allow the better things to grow. God is not necessarily gentle; sometimes God is the wonderful, glorious way of dealing with some cruel evil. God is the path of wisdom, truth, reality and bliss on which great and glorious goals are achieved.

God is not the one to tell you whether to be straight or gay, to have one partner or several. God must be the the way you treat your partners. In the way you live with them, sat-cit-ananda must be manifested. God doesn’t tell you whether to wage war or not, but you must wage war in a way that manifests sat-cit-ananda. What does this mean to your enemies, and to your prisoners? It’s not a rulebook. You must decide what is the most satcitanandamaya (made of satcitananda) thing to do in a certain situation, but in order to do that you must personally, directly feel the living God within your consciousness, and allow this awareness to guide your actions. What will those actions be, it depends on the circumstances. Bhagavata-purana is full of stories about what God would do in a certain situation, but it’s not a rulebook, it’s inspiration. It’s not for stupid people, who only want simple rules to obey. This is a sophisticated, nuanced approach, sometimes called karma-yoga, essentially doing things in such a way that your actions are a form of yoga, unity with God. It’s not a list of things allowed and prohibited, because seemingly evil means can do great good, and seemingly good means can do great evil. But if you surrender your actions to God, whom you first need to feel within, then your actions will be correct and will manifest sat-cit-ananda.

That’s why I love Krishna, partially because how he improvises proper action in astonishing ways, and fucks with people’s established ideas of right and wrong; the purpose of the stories is to gradually get you to understand that Krishna is what is right, that he is the way, the truth and the life, that his improvisations are God in action, that God isn’t static and correct action isn’t a rulebook; it’s a dance to the tune of God, and God is gloriously beautiful and funny and an ocean of intelligence that is wide open. That’s also why I hate Islam so much, because its religion is a rulebook and its god is a stupid evil cunt.

I’ve been thinking about how NDE testimonies and spiritual experiences can be used to prove existence of a transcendental, supraphysical reality with great ease, making materialistic atheism untenable.

However, there’s quite a step from there to using it to prove any particular theology.

If anything, it seems to disprove certain religions, like Islam; the character of God as seen in NDE experiences and mystical experiences is exactly the opposite from Allah as revealed by Muhammad, the recommended way of life is opposite to Islamic (formality is irrelevant, religious conflict is unimaginable, a believer/unbeliever dichotomy is irrelevant, basically everything Islam is, is irrelevant or wrong). The fact that some kind of God does exist doesn’t mean that religions that believe in God are validated. Religions that believe in a vengeful, spiteful bully crybaby God are in fact completely invalidated by a God who is love, wisdom, understanding, clarity and, basically, high consciousness. The entire theory that says that if there is a God, religions must be right, is in fact indefensible, because the fact of existence of something doesn’t say anything about its nature or character. So, basically, according to the reality check, it’s better not to believe in any kind of God but be a loving person who treats others with kindness and aspires to greater knowledge and higher consciousness, than to believe in one God but think that unveiled women are fair game for rape, that infidels should be killed or subjugated and that God cares anything about how much you bow before him. A paradox is that NDE experiences validate Buddhism, which doesn’t necessarily believe in any kind of God, and they invalidate Islam, which believes in God and heaven, because a God of NDE experiences essentially is a Buddhist.

Some will say that some NDE experiences, as well as the spiritual experiences of some religious converts, directly confirm Christianity, but I would rather say that this means that Christianity has the “mandate of heaven”, that its basic tenets of love, forgiveness, faith and universal kindness are supported by the spiritual beings in charge. You could expect the same thing within the Hindu paradigm, where God would take the form that is closest to the person and reveal the most useful truths in that form, which is easiest to understand, or from the Buddhist paradigm, where a dakini would take some form that is the closest equivalent of transcendence in the mind of the person in order to manifest a spiritual message.

You see now why I think it’s very difficult to use spiritual experiences as proof of some specific theology; it’s because the experiences validate a certain spectrum of religious beliefs, while invalidating religions from another spectrum, but when you get to the specifics, it’s wiser to conclude that they don’t matter all that much, than to waste time nitpicking. That’s why I don’t waste time defining myself in terms of religious beliefs – it’s an exercise I leave to those with nothing better to do. I stand for certain principles, for certain general things, and against certain general things. I do certain things that are in accordance to my beliefs, and I avoid doing things that oppose them. That’s why I can function just fine with people whose beliefs and practices are of a certain spiritual spectrum, regardless of their adherence to some formal belief system, but it’s also why I’m at war with people whose beliefs and practices are from an opposed spectrum. You can’t think that a guy who approved enslaving and raping prisoners of war is a prophet of God and be on good terms with me, because I’m your sworn enemy. I’m the friend of those enslaved and raped, because God is with the victims of evil, never with the villains.

There’s a historical tale that I like a lot, about a medieval Hindu warlord who waged guerrilla warfare against the Muslim occupiers, I can’t remember the name, but basically at one point he captured a Muslim princess of some sort, and she expected to be enslaved and raped, because that’s what the Muslims would do to the “unbelievers”. However, the guy wasn’t a Muslim, so she was in for quite a surprise, because Hindu scriptures order men to treat all women other than their wife as they would treat their mother. He told her “it’s a pity that my mom wasn’t as beautiful as you, because I’d probably have turned out better” and basically treated her like an honored guest.

So basically, if you have evidence of powerful spiritual beings who commend treating others kindly and lovingly, Christianity would get a pass, Hinduism would get a pass, and Buddhism would get a pass, because, guess what, their religious scriptures say you should treat others kindly. Even Satanism would fare better than Islam, because according to Satanism you should treat others kindly unless they really fuck with you. If they do, you should tell them to stop. If they don’t, you should tell them again, more forcefully. If they still fuck with you, destroy them. Since this is basically reasonable, a practicing Satanist could actually fare rather well in the eyes of God, but a Muslim, who is told to lie to the “unbelievers” and to deceive them, then to subjugate them, enslave them, rape them and kill them, he’d get really, really screwed when he meets the actual God for whom there is actual evidence, unlike their Allah which is basically a hallucination of a madman based on distorted hearsay of Bible. Now don’t tell me that a Muslim can be a good person. I know he can, but he can’t be a good person and a good Muslim at the same time, because Islam is inherently evil and spiritually corruptive.

Religions tell us that the most important thing for salvation is to believe in a certain kind of God and to belong to their sect. As it turns out, nothing could be less important. What’s actually important is what you are and what you do, and what you should aspire to, essentially, to be like those spiritual beings of light from the NDE experiences – to radiate understanding, loving kindness and knowledge, to be the clarity that calms the disturbed minds of others and introduce knowledge and light, to be the light of God that shines in the world and leads others from darkness. That’s the purpose of life.

A friend yesterday remarked that my article about faith and skepticism doesn’t really deal with the kind of faith that the religious fanatics have.

But of course it doesn’t. I’m not defending the religious fanatics. In fact, they are a part of the same problem as the skeptics, because skeptics summarily reject perfectly sufficient evidence just because they don’t like it, and the religious fanatics choose to believe in things for which no good evidence is provided. So the choice isn’t really between those two, it’s between them and a reasonable approach, where you believe in things based on the evidence that you personally have, but without expectations that others need to accept this evidence.

But first, let’s quantify faith.

Type 1 faith is the faith I have in the fact that my car is still parked in front of the house, if my wife didn’t take it to go somewhere. There’s always a possibility that it was stolen, or that the aliens abducted it, or maybe I’m completely crazy and I’m deluding myself that I have a car, but the reasonable assumption is that it’s where I left it. I can’t verify it from where I’m sitting right now because my workplace is across the building, but I believe it’s there based on my memory and application of reason. If you don’t have this kind of faith, you are mentally ill and you are incapable of performing any kind of common tasks, because in almost everything we rely on memory, and we don’t constantly go around the house to re-check that the kitchen is still there just because we don’t see it from the bathroom. If there is no valid reason to assume that something changed from the last time we established the facts, it’s reasonable to have faith that the gravitational constant is still what it was ten years ago, as well as the speed of light.

Type 2 faith is when you have two possible, equally valid interpretations of the same facts, and you need to choose one based on something other than reason. Reason brought you to the point where you can’t know for sure whether option A or option B is true, because in both cases the same facts remain valid, both solutions will have weak points, and in both cases you will need to ignore or disregard some problems in order to solve others. In order to solve the dilemma, you need to make a leap of faith in one direction or another, and proceed from there. If it turns out that you were wrong, you need to change your mind and admit you chose to believe in the wrong option, but since additional evidence brought you to that point, you actually made progress and you are no longer stuck at the same spot. This is the kind of faith people needed to have in order to adopt the heliocentric system when evidence for its validity was insufficient to make the model work. If you don’t have it, you can’t make progress in science.

Type 3 faith is when you believe in things contrary to evidence, based on strong belief in something that has no rational grounds. This is the kind of faith religious fanatics have, and in order to block the voice of reason that warns them that they are on less than solid ground, they resort to hysteria and borderline madness.

Type 4 faith is when you don’t know what the reality is because your brain is so severely malfunctioning, you’re hallucinating. In this state, you can have faith in things that are not only irrational, but they would be irrational to a type 3 believer.

Applied to religion, type 1 faith is when the disciples believed what Jesus told them because he just saw him rise from the dead, talk to them comfortingly and then ascend to heaven. The degree of confirmation of his supernatural power was such, that it would not be rational for them to doubt his statements. If the statements later proved not to be true in the expected way, they would conclude that they misunderstood him, not that he lied. This is the kind of faith in God that you have when you saw him, but you can’t repeat the experience at will. You trust your memory.

Type 2 faith is what people have if they didn’t directly experience God, but they believe it’s possible that someone did, they just can’t be sure. They therefore make a leap of faith and accept that God is real and can be experienced by some, and it would be great if everybody could do it, but it obviously isn’t that simple and one can’t just verify something like that at will, just like one can’t just decide to verify Moon landing at will, because it’s impractically expensive. You can’t go there yourself to verify, you can’t see someone go there right now because it’s impractical, but there are credible witnesses and documents and it is more irrational to doubt them than to trust them. But this kind of faith can only get you so far. You can’t really make life-altering choices based on some scripture written thousands of years ago if you don’t have a more personal, direct reason to believe it’s all true. This is why type 2 faith is not completely rational, nor is it completely irrational, but is a necessary transitional step from lesser to greater knowledge. It contains a risk of error, but without acceptance of this risk there is no possibility of change and learning.

Type 3 faith is irrational, but not completely insane. This is the kind of faith people have when they decide to become suicide bombers in order to get their virgins in afterlife. You can talk to them, but it won’t do much good, because people snap out of this only because when something changes in their internal reasoning and their inner motives for embracing the irrational faith subside. This is not really religion, it’s fanaticism and hysteria.

Type 4 faith is pure madness, and there’s not much one can say about that. It’s the kind of faith you have when you’re so stoned you see dragons in the kitchen.

The problem with the atheists is that they assume that religious people have type 3 and type 4 faith, because this is easy to ridicule. They occasionally argue with type 2, but they are on loose ground there and they usually argue as if they are talking to a type 3 person, using emotional arguments. They completely dismiss the possibility of type 1 faith in religious matters, because if they accepted that, they wouldn’t be atheists, they would be type 2 believers.

You can notice how I never mention certain knowledge as an option? You’re right, I don’t. Because there’s no such thing, or almost. Even when you directly perceive something, there’s the question of interpretation. So even in that case you need to have type 1 faith that you understood it correctly. Certain knowledge is the domain of type 3 and type 4 lunatics.