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1. What is the basic premise of CHB?
2. What is a body being?
3. Why do you object so much to spirituality?
4. But why does CHB insist on monism? Couldn't its embrace of the body be incorporated into dualism?
5. What is the goal of CHB?
6. How can this message be communicated best?
7. Why is CHB so materialistic?

1. What is the basic premise of CHB?

That we are body beings and that religion is a bodily experience, not a spiritual one.

2. What is a body being?

It is first off not a spiritual being. If we believe in spirituality then we believe that the most important part of us, our essence, belongs to some spiritual world rather than to this world of earth and bodies. Since no one can deny the reality of earth and bodies, it means believing in two parallel and distinct types of existence: spiritual and material. To this we wholly object.

If you believe in the two worlds viewpoint, inevitably you see one as more important or more final than the other, and that is the spiritual world. Correspondingly you must see the material world as incomplete, dependent, less desirable: you see it as mechanical and lifeless if not for an infusion from the world of spirit.

We are convinced the two worlds viewpoint is intellectually and morally flawed. It leaves us with life not really making any sense.

Instead, we insist on one world, the world of bodies. We are body beings through and through. And those traits others assign to a spiritual world -- our consciousness, our experiences, our thoughts -- they remain just as wonderful in our view, but they belong to this world of bodies. Thus life is whole and one, not torn asunder into two hypothesized but incomplete worlds.

3. Why do you object so much to spirituality?

Because the very word itself proclaims the false premise of two worlds. As soon as someone embarks on a spiritual quest, they have stumbled into intellectual neverland. They will never get where they are going because the two worlds theory is simply mistaken and the word "spirituality" embraces the mistake. In fact it depends on it.

If we reject dualism for monism -- the theory that there is one world of existence not two -- then we have to decide whether that one world is material or immaterial: matter or spirit. But the world of bodies is undeniable: even those few who claim to deny it behave as if it were indeed real (if they didn't, they would not long live). So the only monism that is a realistic choice is the monism of the physical world: and this in fact turns out to be the only satisfying solution to any religious quest. But to begin on a spiritual quest is to begin by denying monism and embracing dualism.

4. But why does CHB insist on monism? Couldn't its embrace of the body be incorporated into dualism?

Not successfully. Dualism is inherently unbalanced - one side inevitably siphons value away from the other. In fact, the spiritual or Godly side of dualism only exists because of the assumption that it is necessary to provide value and meaning for the other side. Showing that the material world doesn't need and can't obtain value or meaning from the spiritual world doesn't just raise the stature of the physical world, it destroys the raison d'etre of dualism. It takes away exactly what a spiritual world exists to provide: a source of meaning to things. The whole house of cards collapses.

While dualism is inherently unstable and has the impossibility of explaining how the two worlds ever meet or come together in a person, materialist monism has no such problems. As long as we abandon all the vestiges of dualism, such as the dead matter/live spirit conundrum or any notions of the primacy of the mind or of mental design, monism is inherently stable.

That's it. The result is a physical monism that's logically impregnable and religiously satisfying.

5. What is the goal of CHB?

To transform the religious life of the world into something body-based, with an interpretation of our religious experiences which brings sense and meaning back to religious thought. No more religious lies. No more self-deception. Bring us back to honesty about experience; do so without devaluing joy and hope and the pleasure of being alive. In fact, to celebrate the pleasure of being a living body is essential to religious expression. CHB redirects religion back to this root.

The material world is the source, the root, and the completion of our existence.

6. How can this message be communicated best?

By using language that inspires while being grounded in our bodies, mixed with fundamental thrusts at the dishonesty and gross errors of the various theologies in the world today.

CHB must espouse atheism and mortality, but always in a manner which places the emphasis on celebrating the nature of our existence (it is the finite, not the infinite, which is holy). We must redirect attention to the largest questions: What makes life worth living? Why does God not work as a way to explain existence? What is the essence of being alive? What is thinking?

The world's theologies pretend to answer these questions, but upon examination, they don't. They pretend to explain our vague feeling that living is worthwhile -- but fail. They rely on confusion about the nature of thought to disguise their own central logical flaw. That flaw is dualism, it is the mistaken split of everything into live spirit and dead matter.

7. Why is CHB so materialistic?

It's not. The word "materialistic" usually refers to a love of consumerism: of buying things because you want them, not because you need them or even because they improve the quality of your life. This is unrelated to materialism, the philosophy that everything in the world is physical, a part of what scientists call the space-time continuum of matter/energy. Denying that there is a separate, "spiritual" type of existence is not the same at all as embracing consumerism.

Because we deny that there is a heaven, we find ourselves compelled to treat earth as an eden. There is no second chance elsewhere. Because we die, our life is carried on by others or it's not carried on at all: therefore we really do have a considerable stake in each other now and in the future. We are all one human family sharing common joys and felled by common diseases, and this earth is all we have.

Theism and spirituality make us selfish because they offer the promise of personal salvation. Regardless of the fate of others, if you believe the right things you can escape, they tell us, and gain eternal life with God. Spirituality is essentially a selfish business.

The church of human bodies exposes this selfishness as a fiction. We recognize that the human species has survived and thrived through cooperation and community. Earth is all we've got. We can't escape from the world, and if we don't share it and preserve it, we all go down together.

CHB offers a sounder basis for opposing excessive consumerism than theism does. It focuses our attention on earth's long term viability as a living planet, and on the economic conditions of others.