Traditional Christians celebrate Christmas as the birthday of Jesus, the man whom they believe God sent to earth to teach, be crucified and resurrected, thereby vicariously saving us from our sins and ensuring us a place in heaven if we believe in him.
            The majority of people in the world adhere to other religions [...]

At its highest level, spirituality is consciously communing with Spirit—that magnificent, incomprehensible creative force that we call God. It is about transcending the ego-induced illusion of separation and experiencing ourselves as integral parts of the Whole, free from fear.
It sounds so wonderful, and we all wish we could attain it, but few do. The allure [...]

A few years ago after George Harrison died, many TV and radio networks ran remembrances of him.  One was an interview that Mike Douglas did with George back in the late ’60s.  Douglas was asking questions of George trying to gain some insight into his true persona, about which he was always quite guarded.  It went something [...]

The other day a friend told me about a poster he saw which made me both sad and angry. It was a photo of several eight year-olds dressed in their Sunday best, kneeling at the altar of a Catholic church, apparently taking their first communion. The large caption underneath read: Not Guilty.
Catholicism, indeed most if [...]

I just heard the wonderful religious scholar, Karen Armstrong, interviewed on NPR. She spent seven years as a Catholic nun feeling very empty and disillusioned before leaving and has since written several books on religion and spirituality which provide much needed perspective and clarity on these issues. Armstrong has a new book out called The [...]

When someone asks me if I believe in God, my immediate reply is, “Define God.”  Most people define God as the creator, an invisible, omni-present force, who has a surprising number of human characteristics.  He is creative, loving, compassionate and deeply concerned about human beings, while at the same time jealous and vengeful.  In short he is anthropomorphic.  [...]

One Saturday afternoon when my daughter was not quite three I strapped her into the child seat on my bike and we rode down to our neighborhood ice cream parlor. We bought a double scoop of Mint Chocolate Chip in a cup and shared it. When there was just one spoonful left I scooped it [...]

The vast majority of people in the world automatically and unquestioningly inherit their religion from their parents.For something as important as religion, why are we so reluctant to shop around?
One Saturday morning I was sipping my coffee and reading the newspaper when the doorbell rang. This was an unusual occurrence as we lived in a [...]

It is ironic that one of the key processes enabling human evolution—normalization—also holds it back. Normalization is the tendency of the human mind to gradually turn new and fascinating phenomena into the normal and humdrum. While it serves a valuable purpose in that it frees the mind to deal with the daily onslaught of new [...]

Meaning. It seems that people are seeking it more these days than ever before. We’ve all tried settling for less but somehow its lack just leaves us empty. Oh, most of us are good at pretending, many for lifetimes. But sooner or later the desire for meaning inevitably begins to pester us….
In the midst of [...]

This post is a bit of a departure for me but I had so much fun writing it that I thought others would get a few laughs as well. Please note that it is published with my wife’s smirking approval.
My wife and 16 year-old daughter are shopping addicts. It’s unquestionably [...]

By now half the country has seen, read or heard about The Secret, the movie and companion book that reveals the supposed age-old secret of manifesting what we want in life. In a nutshell, it’s all about intention and visualization—identifying exactly what it is we want, focusing our intention on getting it, and visualizing [...]

The other day I sent my sweet mother, a devout lifelong Lutheran, an email about my religious and spiritual beliefs. It was a topic she had skirted for decades, probably out of fear of what she would learn and what if would mean for my eternal salvation. Mom was surprised to hear me say I [...]

The Bible and the resultant Judeo-Christian ethic it helped create has had a huge influence on the development of western civilization over the last 3,000 years. Much of it has been has been helpful; especially the emphasis on morality. From an evolutionary standpoint this, no doubt, is a major reason why Western civilization has grown [...]

This piece on Barack Obama from the London Times is incredibly clever…..
He ventured forth to bring light to the world
The anointed one’s pilgrimage to the Holy Land is a miracle in action – and a blessing to all his faithful followers

Gerard Baker

 
 
And it came to pass, in the eighth year of the reign of [...]

Take a few seconds to answer these two simple questions: Do you believe that God is perfect? Do you believe that God is omnipresent (everywhere)? If your answers to these two questions is “yes” then by definition, everything is perfect. Do you believe this?
Imagine the universe prior to the Earth’s formation 4.5 billion years ago. [...]

I once watched a television show about the Holocaust involving a panel discussion of three people, one of whom was an elderly Jewish rabbi. When the moderator asked him the question, “How do you reconcile the notion of a loving God with something as horrible as the holocaust?” the rabbi responded, “God was napping.”
I don’t [...]

Most Westerners are familiar with the story of Jesus Christ—perhaps the greatest moral teacher of all time. While the gospels devote many pages to his life, ministry, crucifixion and resurrection, the accounts of what happened to him after that are minimal. One would think, once Jesus was physically back walking on the earth after his [...]

I can’t tell you how many emails I’ve gotten from beekeepers informing me that worker bees are female (Buzz, the main character in To Bee or Not to Bee, is male). Female beekeepers in particular are bothered by this as they feel a gender affinity with their “girls,” who work so hard to provide them [...]

It’s common for us to refer to things related to God as spiritual—of the spirit—the unseen, underlying creative force of the universe. But when we do this we limit ourselves and confuse our “spiritual” thinking.
It’s commonly accepted that God is omnipresent—God exists everywhere at all times. It’s also commonly accepted that there exist many realms, [...]

Despite denials, distractions and foot-dragging by Big Oil, Big Coal, and the Cheney/Bush Administration, the people of the United States have finally gotten that global warming is real. The tipping point has finally been reached–it is no longer a question of if, but by how much and when.
One doesn’t need to be a scientist to [...]

We humans don’t have the mental capacity to conceive of something as expansive and magnificent as God. But we want to have some divine concept to grasp on to so we’ve done the best we could—we’ve created our ideas and mental images of God. And because we are unable to conceive of God but are [...]

The average person thinks of himself as a body topped by a head with a mind, governed by an ego. And because he so strongly identifies with his body and ego, he fears anything that might threaten them, which leads to a fairly angst-ridden existence.But when we read and hear the teachings great spiritual masters [...]

Two people earn $50,000 annually. One needs $70,000 to live on. The other needs only $30,000. They both earn the same amount–who is wealthier? And why?
Recently I watched Larry King interviewing Chris Angel, the amazing illusionist, on TV. If you aren’t familiar with him, Chris is the new David Copperfield but in a rock star [...]

With the recent visits of the Pope and the Dalai Lama to the U.S. it struck me how interesting it is the way the leaders of different religions present themselves to the world and the subtle (and not so subtle messages) this conveys.
The Pope is always dressed to the nines–gorgeous, heavy, floor-length robes, usually [...]

Bees and I go way back. When I was one I was sitting in my high chair on our screened porch lost in the innocent oblivion of infancy when suddenly a terrible, sharp pain pierced my right forearm. The most traumatic experience of my short life (other than birth), it instantly produced a gusher of [...]