Following my latest post, I wanted to explain a bit more about religious diversity. It is something that we all struggle with – the idea that other people disagree with us. It is difficult to wrap our heads around why they should be allowed to do so when clearly one of us is right.
Logical attacks by one group against those who don’t think like them abound on the Internet. In the past week alone I’ve read logical exhortations of why all religion is irrational and therefore childish; why all religions other than Christianity are irrational; etc.. I’d probably be citing examples about Hinduism or Buddhism or Islam right now if I lived in a different country.
All of this seems to suggest that logic is of important, but not omnipotent utility when discussing matters of spirituality.
I think it’s fairly indisputable that logical deduction and the scientific method are the best ways to determine the best pragmatic course of action as a society. When you want to know whether to outlaw something, a society based on respecting the rights of individuals should ask: “Does this thing harm individuals? Does prohibiting this thing harm individuals?”
Those are questions which can be answered through scientific inquiry (which presents you with carefully measured facts) better than through personal experience (which vary widely from individual to individual and are so influenced by cognitive bias that the same people often espouse wildly differing opinions at different points in their lives).
However, it is also empirically, demonstrably true that human experience is neither determined nor ruled by empirical facts.
There’s good reason for this.
Our brains were not designed to be science machines. The fact that we are capable of scientific inquiry and rigorous logic is a great achievement, gained through tremendous effort. But to claim that these things do (or should) be our only basis for doing anything is like saying that we should act on vision alone, since it gives us the most detailed information about our surroundings, while ignoring the other four (well, technically five or six) sense.
Even if you say you’re going to act on vision alone, you’re lying. Your brain is still going to perceive what your ears hear and factor that into your thoughts, feelings, and actions, even if you insist that you are living a completely sound-free lifestyle.
This is not to suggest that “there’s no such things as atheists,” as some have proposed. But do you call someone irrational for insisting that sound is a phenomenon worthy of celebrating, even though you find it to be an inferior and unreliable sense? Do you condemn somebody who benefits from listening to music, since there’s no direct physical mechanism for music to improve one’s life?
I hope I haven’t lost you with my metaphor. My point is, some people do have spiritual experiences. I’ve lived with them and without them, and even though I consider myself an atheist, it makes my blood boil to hear other atheists suggest (as they often do) that all of religious experience is a scam/fabrication/just an attempt to explain a world they’re not educated enough to understand.
The question of what different individuals do “hear,” spiritually speaking, is a fascinating one to me. And perhaps that is what we should be talking about – what kind of spiritual experience do you “hear,” in the same way we talk about different Myers-Briggs personality types and different skin colors.
I have known people who were raised in deeply religious surroundings, who had every social encouragement to become religious, and yet who never had perceptions of God sufficient to make them believe in anything supernatural.
I have known people raised in strictly atheist homes who still had profound spiritual perceptions that led them to adopt religions for which they were severely socially punished.
I have known people who were raised in deeply religious homes and who felt powerfully drawn to the spiritual life – but whose spiritual perceptions contradicted what they were taught by their religious community from a very early age.
All of this seems to suggest to me that there is much more going on here than either logic or social incentive. Logicians disagree about the spiritual nature of the universe; people who are socially incentivized to believe the same things end up disagreeing. Something else is playing a powerful role in people’s lives.
And yet, whatever spiritual perceptions play such a powerful role in people’s lives are far from universal. Some tell stories of converting to Christianity, for example, as the result of an unexpected spiritual experience. Others tell stories of converting away from Christianity for the same reason.
So we seem to be able to establish that spiritual perception, whatever its source, does not manifest the same way for everyone. For some people it seems to manifest as the Abrahamic God; for others, as pagan gods or goddesses. For some it seems not to manifest at all, or to manifest as a non-sentient, non-anthropomorphic idea.
Let me tell you some stories:
Once there was a young man who desperately wanted to believe in God. He needed something to believe in, and had been raised to believe that God was the best and only thing to believe in; that believing in God was morally right and admirable, anyway.
But he couldn’t do it. Although he had been raised to believe that it was good and right, the teachings he heard from religious leaders growing up did not make intuitive sense to him. When he prayed, he perceived nothing.
That little boy grew up to be an angry atheist; an atheist who had been made to feel guilty and wicked and inadequate because he did not perceive God. An atheist who had felt restricted in many aspects of his life by the laws of a religion which seemed to him pointless.
He grew up to be an angry atheist who regularly railed against the ignorance and idiocy of all those religious folks who tried to force people to believe in something that clearly wasn’t there.
Another story; once there was a young woman who grew up in an atheist household. Her parents were both scholars who had no use for anything traditional or superstitious. Yet this girl began to have experiences with a certain divinity at an early age; and it was not even a popular divinity such as the Abrahamic God.
Her relationship with this divinity ultimately blossomed into a spiritual, magical, and religious practice that became an important part of her life. Even as she, too, pursued a PhD with the aim of scientifically investigating on aspects of the world that were important to her religious worldview.
Her scientific inquiry and vast body of scientific knowledge did nothing to detract from her continued relationship with a divinity that had no place in monotheism, no place, even, in a strict logician’s model of the universe.
Another; once there was a young man who was very angry at religion. Growing up in an abusive dysfunctional religious home, he was an angry atheist regularly regaling the stupidity of the religious who attempted to force their outdated laws and superstitions upon others. He lived wildly, embracing a lifestyle that was the antithesis of what he had been raised into.
Then one day, he had a vision of the Virgin Mary and somehow found himself in the office of a coordinator for a local Christian revival movement. Within a year he had joined an explicitly Christian commune; within three he had converted to Catholicism. He would remain a devout Catholic for the rest of his life.
This story would perhaps be less strange if that little boy hadn’t been raised in a Christian denomination that condemned the Catholic “idolatrous” practice of venerating images of saints, and their clearly “pagan” veneration of the Virgin Mary. Despite that, somehow, she found him – or he found her, as you prefer to think of it.
Last story: there once was a girl who was raised in a devout Irish Catholic family. As a child, she was the most voluntarily devout of her peers; as a teen, she was more devout than her parents, spending hours each week at church in worship.
But her spirituality had always had another side, which did not fit with the teachings of her church. From a very early age she had felt compelled to spend hours alone in the woods, engaging in thoughts, experiences, and activities that could best be described as pagan.
In time she realized that the primary reason for her devotion to Christianity was her love of what she felt in the forest; and the spirits that she talked to, who had no place in the theology of the religion of her birth. Because she had been taught from birth that the church was the place to worship the Creator of the natural world, she worshipped there; but certain church teachings had never made sense to her. She had been waiting for them to start making sense when she got older.
This little girl spent several years as an atheist, jaded by the failure of the religion of her birth, before having a re-awakening to pagan spirituality one day. “On that day,” she said, “I realized that as an atheist, I had been missing half of human experience. There was nothing logical about it; it was just a very powerful experience.”
We could speculate as to what all these stories have in common; all involve a rejection of the “default” worldview, the worldview which these children’s parents expected them to take up.
Indeed, the only universal generalization ventured by William James in his Varieties of Religious Experience was that the profoundly affecting religion must always be a new understanding; nobody has profound religious experiences and thinks that their worldview is exactly like that of their parents. Even if the label is the same, they believe that they have come to some new understanding beyond what they were taught.
Yet I still think that there is something more than social individuation at play. How could a mere instinct to make an identity for oneself manifest as an ongoing relationship lasting years? Why would such a thing intrude upon apparently established identities, such as the two folks in our story who spent time as atheists after falling away from one religion and before falling into another.
There is much to speculate on here. All I can do is share my experiences, and the experiences of others I have collected.
What do you think?
The Queen of Cups 