Eureka! or; Such a long post you may want to go for a root canal instead.
Anyone who has been reading me for awhile knows that I’ve been struggling with the intersection of discussion between spiritual/religious faith and atheism for awhile. As Allison mentioned below, I’ve been carpetblogging over at Pandagon on this issue; Balb has also suffered my voluminous thinking on the matter.
There are a few things that bother me so greatly about discussions which pit science against religion – or more truly, a naturalist philosophy against people who have some definition of divinity operating in their lives.
I have heard recently again on the radio a secular humanist suggesting that “we are beyond religion”, and I have seen a number of atheists on a number of boards suggesting that “we’ve grown past it”. Usually, the argument runs that 1) we use myth or religion to explain the universe and 2) science now takes the place of explanation. Further, since science is falsifiable, it is a far less open to abuse and dogma; religion has been used as a tool of colonization and control for ever and every religion has been so exploited. We should rid ourselves of religion, and stick to science, which will at least self-correct over time.
(There are people who also seem to believe that religion is the progenitor of abuse, control, colonialism, and violence: I’m not going to speak to that premise in part because it’s easily falsified. Black and white thinking, yes: Outgrouping, yes: Intolerance, yes: Totalitarianism, yes: Greed, yes: but all of those things exist in almost every single grouping of human beings. Religion has provided a particularly successful vehicle for such horrific behaviour. Religion often ignores its own spiritual teachings.)
I love science. I love the scientific method. I want to be really clear about that; because it is in fact my love of science that makes me chafe at this “reason” behind atheism. I should make it utterly clear that I in no way need or want people to throw faith at gods or people speaking for those gods: I sell no religion here. My beliefs are my own – as John says, one’s belief is as personal as one’s underwear. It may be utterly appropriate foundational wear for you, but I don’t want to wear it. Atheism seems to me as understandable and measured a response as any other approach to the world; I have no quibble with atheism or atheists.
I *do* have problems with fundamentalists of any philosophical stripe, and that includes fundamentalist atheists. And hoo boy, they do exist. If you are of any philosophical understanding and believe that anybody who is not like you is a bloody idiot who hasn’t thought it through; who is a child or a moron; or who is destroying the world and should be stopped, you’re sharing more worldview with the Religious Right than with the Dalai Lama.
Anyway, the abuse of science by naturalism bothers me. Naturalism uses science, but science IS NOT naturalism. Science is a method by which hypothesis are tested, falsified, or verified. In a lot of human experience, science will not give an absolute answer, regardless of its rigour. Science will often return odds: It might say that you have a 50% chance of loving Metallica, but it cannot pick the Metallica lovers out of the room. Science cannot utterly describe personal human experience, and so we have other languages as well.
And spirituality, for some subset of people vastly larger than zero, is experiential.
As I wrote on Pandagon in response to someone saying human self-reporting of ‘convincing’ spiritual experience was irrational:
In any scientific study of human experience and feeling – whether anthropological, psychological, or sociological – it is utterly rational and appropriate to analyze data phenomenologically. Nor can you say the vulnerability of human perception *disproves* any given thing a human happens to experience. On the other hand, human perception cannot also *prove* any given thing a human happens to experience. For example: There is no “proof” that chocolate tastes yummy: there is only the observation that to a subset of humans, there is a tendency to self-report the enjoyment of chocolate and reasons of biological action on humans that make enjoyment more likely. Science is silent on whether or not chocolate is enjoyable because science cannot assume the shape of a Platonic mouth. There are many mouths. So we’re left to muddy about with our own metaphor and superlative.
The experience of ANYTHING is biological. I experience seeing colour based on chemical and electrical biological chains. I experience the sensation of enjoying a given song based on the same.
So those who would stammer that spiritual or mystical experiences are biological are saying absolutely nothing that would come anywhere close to “disproving” spiritual experience. All you can says is that it is humans that experience it. If you were a strict naturalist, you may say human perception and experience is largely irrelevant to the operation of the mechanical or physical world: but I would 1) urge caution with that assumption and 2) suggest we do not live in an entirely mechanical world.
And (as I hope to show) spiritual experience is one relatively major factor in the creation of the organization that becomes religion – and therefore becomes open to exploitation and abuse.
What is spiritual experience? How often does it happen? What effect does it have on religiosity? On intolerance?
Well, see, here I’m left to my own definitions, although they’re going to be damn clear to anyone who has has sort of spiritual experience. In my experience (and in talking to those who have had similar experiences – variously of Christian, Atheist, Jewish, Buddhist, Agnostic and Hindu beliefs), I would say there is some combination of the following:
Sense of trust, connection, awe, wonder, love, and security. The paradoxical feeling that you are important, divine, eternal, perfect; and simultaneously irrelevant, flawed, miniscule, limited, mortal, and ridiculous. A sense that this is amusing in some way. A feeling that you should help, heal, tend, mend, or create positive things, and an extreme aversion to violence, coersion, manipulation, rage, or greed. A sense that other people are not so different then you, or that, in fact, they are you, or perhaps that you are them. Or none of you are anything: the words that describe this feeling are variable and probably based on culture. There is a sense that the woes of the world are paradoxically meaningless and meaningful: that there is an imperative to make it better and yet a sense that it doesn’t *really* matter, in the long run, because everything is filled with rightness. A sense that a curtain has been pulled back and you can see the whole beautiful, tragic, winning, losing, painful, joyful disgrace and wonder that is the world.
For people who are in various faiths or traditions, this may come very strongly attached to those faiths. So for some, there is a conversion experience with Christ or Mohammed or the Buddha or Shakti or Krishna or what have you: for others it is more personally mythic. Far be it from me to criticize any of the myraid of ways this is expressed: I can only disagree with the idea that there has been one way of experiencing. Of course, most Christians I know who have such experiences with some regularity are working their butts off at promoting religious tolerance…
I have read a lot of religious texts. Many (although certainly not all) seem to be different descriptions of what this sort of feeling leaves you with. Give up your ego. Don’t suffer. It is all irrelevant; but work like a damn to make it better. Don’t kill. Don’t rape. Don’t torture. Live with love. Live with laughter. Turn the other cheek, the golden rule, consider the lilies, tanha, samsara, illusion, god’s plan, trust, visualize, step out side yourself, the good samaritan, do your duty except when it’s not your duty, nothingness, oneness, no place, all places…
Religions exist because such an experience is identity and life enriching. People want more; spiritual practise from meditation to chanting to praying tries to create the circumstances in which these feelings are most easily felt. But religion *also* exists because finding this centre in a stormy world is hard to come to and sometimes we need reminding. Dogma ossifies when people try to make rules that proscribe, not describe: I have had the experience of speaking to people who had an experience a zillion years ago and have been trying to box or codify that experience in a way they can handle. Metaphors are spun: those metaphors take on life of their own: literalist interpretations arise: and next thing you know some person is out killing in the name of. That’s the ultimate perversion.
(The one thing I’m currently trying to analyze is why many non-Christian faiths – including Buddhism and Judaism and all of the polytheistic religions – come with a strong message of “stick to your own faith and stories”. Christianity is one religion that actively solicits: many of the other religions find conversion a misunderstanding. I find this very interesting; it is a direct counter to using Religion as Colonization Tool, which is an utterly sane thing for a spiritual person to say.)
Now, this experience is a dulling feeling if what you’d like is people to be involved in violent or angry revolution. Religion is certainly one kind of opiate of the masses – be good and be rewarded later – but a spiritual experience is another kind of opiate. Ghandi, Martin Luther King Jr., Christ, and the Dalai Lama are all spiritual men who reacted to the oppression of their people with love and open arms to their oppressers: the same can be said for many people who survived Nazi Germany. These are all folks who unabashedly stare into the face of torture and pain and recognize it as an ‘evil’, and yet are somehow accepting of the perpetrators. Religious or spiritual rejection by political movements is therefore hard to parse: what is being rejected? Intolerance and dogma? Or unwillingness to victimize? Religion? Or spiritual understanding?
There are some very good rational ethical structures to be like the peaceable spiritualists. I am not saying that morality is at all predicated on a spiritual experience. I certainly hope not, because although I have had spiritual experiences, I don’t LIVE there the same way others do. I have to use my moral reasoning to prevent myself from running over that bitch who’s utterly ignoring my request that she move to the side a little so that I can get my stroller out of the way of oncoming traffic.
On the other hand, the *experience* of that feeling gives me a memory to bolster myself should I want to slip and push her into traffic. And I am aware that my understanding of her as a bitch is imperfect. I am aware in some emotive way that although I would very much like to punch some people square in the kisser, that I’m not being true to my emotional self. It is reason that actually restrains me in some situations. Fortunately, there is a collusion.
One of the things I’ve heard is that spiritual experience is not what puts butts in pews. I am sure this is based, in part, on people’s experience with other people who stick their butts in pews week after week and then go hold signs that say horrendous things like “God hates Fags”. So yes; obviously, people turn to religion for reasons other than spiritual experience.
I have a theory that one experience and no more might create dogma and many experiences create acceptance. However, *a Kinsey like study* needs to be done on this phenomena.
Okay, so does any of this prove God? No, it doesn’t. Of course not. Why would it?
Can science explain the biology behind it? Definitely. Hell, put it in the well water. Voila. World peace.
But will science kill god? No. That’s daft. Remember the word “trust”? That transliterates pretty directly to faith…
From Pandagon, again:
The “spiritual” experience is being called that because *it is spiritual discussion that best describes the experience for many people*. Just like poetry is a better vehicle for the description of love. Love can be explained scientifically, but love poetry tends to be more robust in lending a vocabulary than telling somebody that your endorphin cascades are activated when you see them and you’d like to engage in some pair bonding. The scientific explanation is necessarily less personal: your INSTANCE of pair bonding is characterized by things like “the way you hold your knife… The way you sing off key…”. Like any intense emotion, mystical experience or spiritual or whatever you’d call it is going to be very personal.
Now, if you happen to know of people who treat God as Santa (thank you for letting me win the superbowl), or you haven’t entirely had explained to you how someone might actually find that thanking god for an Oscar or a carrot or your life spared are roughly equivalent blessings, then the whole thing may seem patently unfair. That’s where all the “otherworldly” stuff comes in: because things seem to be measured differently when experiencing said emotions.
So we’re in the same place. No proof of god: but people believing in something greater – in whatever way they choose or are acculturated to describe that. No disproof that they’re wrong, either, since you can’t logically interrogate a paradox. And yet, intensely positive emotional experience which, when interpreted through the filter of human thought, often creates the idea of god.
Do I believe in God? I’ve been told by atheists that my description of the divine is changing the subject because we all know that “God” is by definition a white bearded Patriarch who hands out favours and punishment and discipline (and, I suppose, “God Hates Fags” signs.) And I say that those people have let the Religious Right or people in their personal experience with a religious agenda hand them their definitions. I don’t accept the Religious Right’s definition of anything, frankly. Well, maybe white glue. Or 2×4s. I’m certainly not going to let them define ‘Christian’ for me: the man or myth Christ as written in their very own text said TURN THE OTHER CHEEK, and accepted prostitutes as friends, hung with lepers, threw a good party, and reaffirmed that worldly things are not worth being a dick over. One should shower the world with love and acceptance – while protesting injustice, sure, but Christ certainly didn’t stand outside the temple with a “God hates Moneylenders” sign, and certainly didn’t go to Moneylender Alley to do so. Yet people with Christ on their lips and hate – or even, indifference – in their hearts send troops across the world to blow the arms off of other people. No. Ridiculous misreading. Black is White misreading. Forgettaboutit.
No, if I were to talk about the divine I would say that we’re emergent properties of the complex system that is often described as god. It’s kind of hard to wrap your face around, though.
Believe it or not, I read the whole thing (ha)!
You did a better job of describing my experience with the spiritual thank I’ve ever done. I especially appreciated a few sections, referenced in this post on my blog.
Wait, wait, Allison. You don’t agree with EVERYTHING I SAY? I’m so hurt.
*g*.
I’m glad that the post was useful to you!
I consider myself an atheist, but I realize I am a bit unusual: my atheism has an emotional basis instead of a “rational” one. An ecstatic atheism, as it were. So your argument makes perfect sense to me. As far as I’m concerned, the one irrefutable reason to believe (or not believe!) in deity is that you feel deeply, in the core of your being, that it exists (or doesn’t). Your description of mystical/spiritual experience is exactly what I have felt, many times — the way we choose to interpret that experience is culturally informed. It feels like Jesus to my sister; it feels like an immense and wonderful NOTHING to me.
I like the idea that I have no soul, that I am essentially a machine (but what an awesome machine!). The thought of this fills me with irrational glee, with deep joy, and a sense that anything is possible.
I am not a postmodernist, by any stretch. I believe in objective reality. But I also believe that we can only experience the world through the very dense prism of self, and that there is something in us that can never quite be comprehended by others. If somebody says “I know god is real because I feel it in my heart”, I can not tell them they don’t really feel it, just because I don’t feel it. And they can’t tell me that my vast, awe-inspiring nothingness is actually god. This is something we each have to wrap out own heads around in our own way.
Rachel – This is extremely interesting to me. I have a couple questions for you, if you feel comfortable sharing: 1) Did your experience(s) precipitate your atheism? ( I have known other atheists with that process, so I was wondering if it were similar for you. )
2) Also, was there a sense of eternal for you that felt eternal in some more … material way? Or was there instead a sense of impermanence (and the beauty in that state as well?)
Man, if someone gave me funding and sufficient academic trust, I’d just love to do a study and get some sense of common experience. Since this is so personal, much like sexuality, and yet there’s some fundamental commonality – much like sexuality.
That would be awesome.
Oh, and I was being silly with Allison, but I should make clear: I LOVE when people bring different views on anything to the table. I will tend to discuss a subject like a dog worries a bone, so in advance apologies, but if anyone wants to tell me they think I’m as muddied as borscht, go for it.
1) I always found organized religion (and even disorganized religion, such as the squishy panentheism my parents practiced) extremely confining, without quite understanding why. They would hold a “Council of All Beings” (*sigh*) and my “totem” was always extremely vivid and spoke to me in beautiful language, and everyone would ooh and ah and I felt like a fake because it was just lucid dreaming as far as I was concerned. Nothing that wasn’t in me already. It was my husband (himself a more traditional, reason-is-all atheist) who first urged me to read Dennett’s “Consciousness Explained” and to make the serious attempt to imagine I had no soul. That was damn scary the first time, but it was also like waking up or being set free.
I had “spiritual” experiences before becoming an atheist, but the religious explanations for them always struck me as utterly hollow. I let those go and it all made sense to me.
2) Well, yes and no. For me a “spiritual” experience is usually a feeling of transcending a paradox. I am acutely aware that I am NOT eternal in any literal sense, but also feel intensely that NOW is itself a kind of eternity. If that makes any sense.
Rachel: Thanks for your persepctive. It makes perfect sense, insofar as any of this does. It’s all utterly paradoxical which is why its so interesting.
I wonder if the elements of seeking and fear (letting go, and that exhilirating panic of “what now?”, the liberation of letting a belief system go) also come into play. I nodded to that description of fear and freedom.
It’s hard to get all meta-analysis like on this stuff, because the languages we’ve been given are so absolute – and maybe the feeling is absolute in some way, too. It feels true, right? I imagine you have as deep a relationship with the trueness of atheism as I have in whatever the hell it is that I believe in and Hugo Schwyzer has with Christ.
Rachel: I have another question, if you don’t mind:
Is there a measure of ‘meaning’ or ‘rightness’ in your experience? It’s hard to say this without sounding vaguely religious (or spiritual, since I’m guessing? neither works very well for you.) What I mean is that you’ve spoken of joy and liberation: I can’t imagine there’s a sense of futility present for you.
How would I phrase that non-denominationally? Hmm. Maybe: Is your existence justified in some way in that emotion?
Allison: I tried to go bug you at your house, but I can’t get past the doorbell. If you come back, maybe you can join in here. I see you identify as Christian, and so I have questions for you too, if you care to share.
Since we’ve got an atheist here, and I whatever I am, both of whom have a dearth of practise whereas Christianity has a long history, I wonder what parts of Christian practise work for you?
Also, is Christ somehow present for you if you’re feeling these emotions? Or, does what Christ said strike you as the teachings of someone coming from a similar place? Or, is there some other connection for you -like praying gets you in touch, or you have experiences in Church or using the Bible?
If anyone else wants to share, I’d love it. If there are any drive-bys, I simply suggest that any trashing of other people’s faiths or belief structures will be *STRICTLY* moderated.
I grew up Catholic. I was given all the answers before I even asked the questions. All was explained in minute detail including what counted as sin and what happened after. At 14 I wanted to become a nun and at 15 I rejected the whole thing. When I started to question the structure it all fell like a house of cards. The one thing I hung on to was a belief that God exists.
I became a Quaker because I was allowed to question. There was no house of card answers, just a process in which questioning was enabled. Somewhere around 25, after a spiritual experience, I decided that I understood it all. My interpretation of God made sense to me. I wrapped it up carefully, stored it in a box in my head and felt comfortable that it was there and I understood. Many years later I took out the box and unwrapped my understanding to look at my beliefs again, to reassure myself that I had my answers. The whole construct that I had created melted away between my fingers and the solid ground that my faith had stood on dissolved beneath me.
I am once more left with questions. The one thing I have hung on to is a belief that God exists. I cannot defend that belief. Maybe it’s more a need than a belief.
But I have decided that it’s alright, no it’s necessary, that I don’t have all the answers. If God were small enough to fit inside my head, than it wouldn’t be much of a God. If I could understand, then I would have made God in my image.
This one is much trickier to answer, Arwen, precisely because the terms are so loaded. I am reminded of a coworker who, upon learning I was an atheist (I’m generally pretty closeted, but it came up somehow), blurted out: “But you seem so… HAPPY!” I think there is a very prevalent idea that atheism=nihilism=futility and despair.
I think it’s tied up with ideas of an eternal self. If there is no soul, and all that is uniquely you is going to completely disappear, what’s the point of having existed? I feel pretty sure that there is no point — certailny no externally mandated point. What “meaning” my life is going to have, I’ll have to make myself, fully conscious that after I am gone all traces of me will eventually be obliterated, as surely as a sand castle on the beach. What the “spiritual” experiences do is make me feel like that’s okay. There doesn’t have to be a purpose. It’s sad, yes, but beautiful.
People have told me they could never be atheists because that idea is just too scary. I don’t know why it doesn’t scare me, but it doesn’t. It makes me feel like, okay, this is my one shot. I suppose I COULD strive to do something so great that my sandcastle would last a bit longer than the others, but mostly it reminds me that I need to be persent in my own life. This is all I get, and I need to experience it, not fritter my life away wishing things were different.
What the “spiritual” experiences do is make me feel like that’s okay.
I think there’s the rub. The feeling of okay, or comfort that comes.
I’m also in agreement in some pretty major ways: for me, there’s a sense of the sadness and the beauty of the impermenance of the identity called “Arwen”. Frankly, the four year old me is no longer, or the 15 year old me: tomorrow, there will be no me of today. I suppose the difference which makes me not-atheist is that I believe in the permenance of the *sand*, and that I think the fact that I have made a shape in the sand is a creative process of the thing often-called-God. I certainly don’t think my sand-shape is mandated, but at the same time, I have felt that the fact that we make such shapes has meaning much larger than what we happen to feel about our particular instance of sand castle.
The ego loss after death is a strong tradition through all the major religions: the Buddhist line of thought would probably say you’ve given up the samsara (illusory nature) of the world; clinging to the ego form of “me” is the exact opposite of enlightenment. If you’re also working to nurture other people with compassion and cheer, you may even be a bodhisattva in those descriptive terms. Buddhist reincarnation is not meant to be that “I” simply get recycled: the idea is often expressed that a candle lights other candles. Your ego is fundamentally considered ‘meaningless’ and ‘impermenant’ but beautiful. Hindu tradition is similar; and even many Christian mystics (and I would argue, Christ himself), suggest that the impermenance of the ego is an important thing to recognize. And that it’s OKAY.
All of which to say that I can look at your atheism and my theism – where my god and your nothingness are emotive equivelances – are pretty damn similar. Which is very, very interesting to me: because, by the label, you and I would sound extremely different in belief structure, and I don’t actually think we are.
Beth: I totally agree about the putting God-In-A-Box. I think you’ve hit on my real problem with dogmatic interpretations: if you think you know God, you’re not paying enough attention to the fact that the experience is very very large and you’re very very small and stupid. But cute. Goddamn it.
Ack, I’m late to the party! Yesterday was GRE day, and after that, my brain was fried. Or I felt lazy. Take your pick.
Can’t get past the doorbell, eh? Does that mean the sign-up function doesn’t work? I might as well turn it off anyway, because while it slows the real comments, it doesn’t seem to have any effect at. all. on the spammers. Grrrrrr.
FWIW, I should have put emphasis on the *always* in “I don’t always agree…” — because 90% of the time, I *do* agree with you. So far. For the answers to your questions, I think I’ll throw something up at my blog, because it’s going to be a long one. The short answer is a disclaimer: many days, I wonder if I actually am a Christian by theology, or if it’s only a cultural artifact of my upbringing.
Hi, guys, I came across this blog entirely by chance while looking for something else, but I found it so interesting I had to hang around for awhile. I guess I’m a member of the so-called “Religious Right” because I publish a non-denominational Christian monthly newspaper that covers a sizable portion of the state I live in. I’m a Christian from birth, and then again from re-birth…I was raised in a Christian home (Lutheran, to be precise, so I got the benefit of all the technical training of Catechism classes and so forth) married into a family who was from a more fundamentalist background, divorced after 15 years and a couple of kids, floated for awhile, and finally ended up in an Evangelical Christian church, and have been there for the last dozen years. A few years back, I felt led (oooh, a Religious Right term?) to address the issue of the way the Christian community is so fragmented. We supposedly all have Christ in common, and yet as you have all so eloquently observed there are such diverse extremes among us that we certainly don’t present a united face to the world. Except, evidently, in those areas that seem to make us appear to be radically unyielding on certain issues. My take was, and is, that Jesus had a very simple, straightforward message. In John 3:17, the first verse after the one everyone seems to know, He states that He came “not to judge the world, but to save it.” Any time Jesus was confronted by people who wanted to reduce what He was about to technicalities, He had a very interesting way of dealing with them…He dealt with THEM as individuals. If you’ll take the time to read the accounts, and look beneath the surface of the “Bible stories”, you’ll see that His responses were made directly to the circumstances and needs of the person who asked the question. He gave them personal, direct answers to very general questions that in most cases were asked in order to try to trip Him up and “expose” him as a fake. Jesus wasn’t about politics, He wasn’t about money, or power, but at the same time He wasn’t some sort of early flower child roaming around advocating peace, love and all that either. His eye was on eternity. When He looked at an individual, His concern was forever, not the moment. Every single step we take, we are one step closer to that eternity, and everything He did and said was to make us aware of that. In order for someone to intellectually understand the thought processes of a true follower of Christ, you first have to comprehend that premise…we believe everyone’s souls are eternal. We believe that our time here is something on the order of the caterpillar phase of the monarch butterfly. (If you aren’t aware, a monarch’s life cycle is 8 weeks, from hatching as a caterpillar, to forming a cocoon, to becoming a chrysalis, to emerging as a butterfly, to mating, laying eggs and dying – then the cycle begins again) Does the progression of a monarch’s life make sense? Why not just start as a butterfly? And yet, it is what it is. They have to survive the caterpillar stage withouth becoming bird food in order to be a butterfly. They have to survive the chrysalis stage. And finally, at the end of it all, they are something unlike their original form in any possible way. How does this happen, and why does this happen, and why does it happen in just that way? If someone who is observing this process can say, well, science shows that this occurs because of this fact, and that fact, and the other fact, then it reduces the miraculous to sheer science, doesn’t it? But the fact remains, even though it is explainable scientifically, it is still miraculous in that it can occur. Why is it such a stretch then to conceive that the process of the soul being earthbound for awhile before being reborn into it’s true home is within the realm of possibility? Just because we can’t quantify it in terms we can put on paper doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, it just means we can’t find the words or terms to explain it.
At any rate, my goal with my newspaper is to bring a sense of unity to the Christian community in my area, and base that unity on Christ’s terms, not the world. We operate the paper the way we operate our family – we focus on the positive important things, and we leave the divisive issues out of it as best we can. No “God Hates Fags” signs allowed in this publication. And we leave out the politics, we don’t ask for money for any self-promotional purposes (although our advertisers do pay for the publication costs). I have to tell you, we’ve done scores of interviews with people who have transcended illness, adversity, poverty, abuse, you name it, based on their faith in Christ. We don’t publish sensational, National Enquirer-type stories, but there was the letter we received from a woman in her eighties who had been diagnosed with terminal cancer as a young mother of 36 who was healed in an instant while kneeling next to her bed in prayer. There was the little boy who underwent surgery, radiation and chemo for testicular cancer at the age of 4 who was outside in his garden playing (very feebly) on a spring day right after his last round of chemotherapy. His parents wanted him to get some fresh air, so they took him out to play ball. He said he was too tired to play ball, he just wanted to catch butterflies. They told him it was too early in the year for butterflies, and besides they didn’t have a net. He insisted, and refused to play catch, so they said “Fine, if you can find a butterfly we’ll try to catch it.” They began walking back to the house, and he was lagging behind, looking for butterflies. When they got to the porch, he called out to them to look, and when they turned to see, he was standing in the middle of the yard with his arms outstretched, and he was literally covered in butterflies of all shapes and sizes. There was the lady who had 4 vertebrae crushed in a car accident (I saw the x-rays) and couldn’t walk, she was in constant pain to the point of deciding on suicide. She wasn’t a Christian, she wasn’t sure what she was. But a co-worker who was a Christian brought her husband to visit, and she explained to this lady her husband had the power of healing through prayer. The only condition was, if she told anyone about it, she couldn’t mention his name. The lady with the injuries was an RN, and she was skeptical, but she thought a little prayer couldn’t hurt. These people prayed over her, and she literally felt the bone knitting together. She’s fine today, no meds, and no injury. She told me this story on the condition we not print it, she just wanted to encourage us in what we do. And she is definitely a Christian today. People come to us all the time, quietly, to tell us the stories they’ve never told anyone before, because they didn’t know who to tell. Every single day we hear stories of faith, and hope and healing and love. These stories have no political purpose, they have no agenda, they aren’t looking for fame or notoriety. They know we don’t publish names, for the most part, on testimonies like that. They just want other people to know that yes, there is a God, and yes, He cares about each and every one of us, and yes, He’s still around even today. For the record, we also publish local and national news stories, church events, music and book reviews, articles on a wide range of subjects, teen pages, senior citizen pages, singles pages, and so forth. The stories I related to you above are only published occasionally, we aren’t looking for readers who want sensationalism, we’ll leave that to the Star and the Enquirer.
The thing I’d like for people to understand about those of us who feel we have a true and meaningful relationship with Christ is this; we aren’t trying to convert you because of any personal gain. We aren’t trying to convince you because we want the safety of numbers in our delusions. We aren’t trying to spread the word because we want to take over the world. We feel the way you would feel if you were standing on a busy street corner and saw a two year old walking in front of a moving bus. The two year old isn’t afraid, because she doesn’t realize the danger, but it is there all the same. If someone doesn’t step in to save her, she is going to be just as dead whether she ever realizes the bus is dangerous or not. If everyone watching just stands there and waits for her to come to an awareness of her situation, its going to be too late. The vast majority of Christian people I know don’t have an agenda for dominating the world. They actually spend quite a bit of time praying for people who don’t know the truth. The grieve over the ones who don’t see the bus bearing down on them. And they’re willing to risk being judged by people who don’t understand, they’re willing to put themselves on the line for people who think they’re just stupid or delusional, they’re willing to reach out even at risk to their own safety to pull that two year old out of the way of that bus, to give her a chance to grow up.
I’m fully aware I’m not as eloquent as many of you, and I evidently don’t spend nearly as much time pondering the meaning of life as you seem to…mostly because I’m very busy trying to get the word out about something that I really don’t see the point of trying to explain. I don’t spend hours trying to understand the nature of sunshine, but I do know I benefit from it. I don’t try to understand the nature of love, but I certainly feel it…to try to reduce it to a series of chemical reactions and firing of neurons would definitely take all the fun out, now wouldn’t it? But one small bit of advice I’d like to give you in your search is this; Please understand that true Christianity is not about faceless masses bowing down and throwing money at a faceless god. Christianity is in its purest form an intensely personal, one on one relationship with God. Each of us stands entirely alone in that relationship, face to face with God. I may pray for crowds of people, but my conversation is entirely between myself and God. I understand that each of us is responsible for ourselves, and we can’t hold anyone else accountable for our relationship with God, or our lack thereof, at the end of the day. My search is my own, and while others can walk alongside me, or I alongside them, it is ultimately my own journey. I do have an obligation, because God’s desire is that none should perish (His words, not mine). The 7 year tribulation you read about (which nonbelievers frequently point to as proof of the bloodthirsty nature of the Christians) is not to give the sinners 7 years of pounding before the end as a punishment, its to do every last thing possible to convince them of the truth before it’s finally to late.
It seems to me the biggest stumbling block nonbelievers have is that they try to stand back and quantify something that by its very nature must be personalized in order to be understood. I have to run, and just so you know, you’ve been added to my prayer list. I really do hope you find what you’re looking for, because you all are so obviously searching, and you’ve obviously invested a great amount of time and thought into the search.
God Bless :-)
Could it be that the world’s religions are simply the manifestations of dreams in the hands of skilled strorytellers?
I haven’t done as much reading as you have in this regard, and not nearly so much excellent thinking. Still, my beef, insofar as it is one, strictly centers around assertions of fact that are plainly false. When religions posit something that must be believed in the face of massive contravening evidence, it is there that I part ways with it. Coincidentally, in nearly every instance where I find this so, somebody is being screwed by the religion.
Scott, I think there is a big difference between religion and spirituality. Science my disprove many of the ideas put forth by various religions, but science doesn’t touch on spirituality. What people feel, the comfort they are given, the truths that they find, cannot be explained away by science.
Damn. I miss you. I love to talk theology with you, and I think by reading this, everyone, even the atheists, can understand why I chose you to be my second daughter’s Godmother. I can think of no better place for anyone to come for support on their spiritual journey.
I, as you know, am Christian. I have never felt that to be limiting in any way. I’ve also never believed that I had any kind of an inside track on God and all that means. I have met many people who think my Christianity and my left-wingedness are somehow at odds. In truth, my faith in Creator, Christ and Spirit informs my open-mindedness. I know that not all Christians think this way. I don’t think I have all the answers and I know I have a lot to learn from people of other experiences. Not all Christians feel that way. Nor do all atheists or people of other religions.
Fundamentalists of any stripe are the problem, as I see it. The compulsive need to be right in one’s belief or lack thereof and the belittling or abusing of others who believe differently is inappropriate and unkind. And religion has not cornered the market on that.
Scott, there is a big difference between fact and truth. Many things can be true for people who believe them without being factual or scientifically provable.
Rachel, who has been commenting above, finds her “nothing” to be as comforting as I find my “something”. Both our beliefs and the strength we find therein are equally true. Neither can be backed up with fact. Doesn’t matter. Both still true.
Scott: For my own part, I understand where you’re coming from on “assertions of fact that are plainly false”. That’s something that bugs me as well, and a caveat for any of us who would assert “there is no god” as opposed to “there is no way to tell”. From a standpoint of objective, intellectual honesty, I can no more prove there is no god than I can prove there aren’t invisible flying purple hippos. But I feel no “Pascal’s wager” compunction, not even with regard to the hippos.
The FACT, however, is not “there is no god”. The fact is “I FEEL there is no god”. This is not to say a feeling proves something else is true, but rather that it’s the feeling we have to address when speaking to belief of any kind. It’s easy to dismiss feeling as a chemical trace in the brain — it absolutely IS, I mean, but that does not make it something trivial that should be disregarded.
This is something that really interests me, in fact. My grandmother has tiny strokes, almost daily, and there’s a lot she doesn’t remember about the past — what she does remember, absolutely clearly, is how she felt. She doesn’t remember what her husband’s name was, but she remembers he was scary. Now some of this has to do with which parts of her brain have been damaged, undoubtedly, but then I have the example of my mother and sister, who have been feuding for years. They will recount the same interaction, and it will sound like they’re talking about two different events. When you confront one with the other’s account, she’ll absolutely deny that she ever said anything of the kind, and be shocked by the “wrong” impression the other one had. Over time, I’ve been forced to conclude that short of videotaping all their interactions, the objective facts will never be known. All they come away with is how they FELT.
Another example: I once angered this same sister so much that she called me a fucking bitch. I confronted her about it later on, and she absolutely denied that she would ever have said such a thing. It’s not in her usual repertoire of epithets. This presented me with a problem: I remembered the incident with (what I believed to be) absolute clarity. “Fucking bitch” was seared onto my brain as if with fire. She had to be misremembering, I thought, and yet, if I were honest, why should her memory be any more suspect than mine? Other people were there; no one was willing to swear to “fucking bitch”. What could I trust, here? Only this: that whatever she called me, it HIT me with all the emotional force of “fucking bitch”.
Emotion trumps fact. Emotion creates its own kind of fact. The only thing that was absolutely, unquestionably true was how hurt I was.
And this (sorry this is so long, Arwen!), is what informs my comprehension of other people’s religious/spiritual understanding. The world has hit them with something so big they can only call it god. I can’t tell them they don’t feel it. Maybe it’s saying “no god” to me. We’re not wrong that we’ve felt it, and if some of us don’t have the perspective to add “for me” after “true”, I think it’s permissible to tacitly add it.
Rachel: No worries, ever, about things being so long. We are talking about something INTENSELY personal, and (I think), there’s vast evidence in human culture that we twist ourselves in absolute knots to relate.
Scott: I think that there’s a serious problem in literalist interpretations of mythos, and we tend to use metaphor and current cultural cues. Rachel used the “sand castle” metaphor: the problem is if I then described myself as an atheist and went around screaming that Atheists Believe People are Made Of Sand!! Of course, then your analysis that I was as nuts as Jimmy Carter’s farm would be absolutely justified; but the problem is twofold… 1) I don’t speak for all atheists, and 2) Some atheists, understanding Rachel’s metaphor in a different way, would defend the metaphor and not me.
In terms of science and maths, we have to be a little careful not to abuse or misread what it’s saying. Mathmatics and science are not generally described as purely Newtonian anymore: they don’t see the world as purely mechanistic. Perception is a sticky place on a lot of levels.
When I was in my last year of University, I examined a proof (and comprehended the proof very little, I admit), that had been published which claimed to show that not all of the universe and its laws is describable in mathmatical terms. I think if you look at a lot of string and quantum theory in the higher levels these days, you’ll find a lot of excitement about the permeability of everything we “know” – hence all the crazy sci-fi shows with multiple probabilistic universes which collide and yadayadayada.
The discussions are pretty fevered: you’ve got the deterministic people and the non deterministic people (similar arguing as to free will vs. lack of free will: we’re people that repeat ourselves…)
The movie “What the Bleep Do We Know?” has a lot of interesting explorations; (and a lot of stuff, that frankly, I would be highly skeptical about unless replicated, all in a pop-sci bun); but I recommend it simply because it *does* all access to all of the wonder that’s going on in higher physics and math.
I think all of this science leaves a hell of a lot of room for philosophy. In fact, regarding time (that sticky variable I blogged about before), there are some scientists who are shrugging and leaving it to the philosophers.
Okay. So what I’m saying is that science isn’t saying “no” to the idea of “something”. In some ways, taking the word meta-physical as is without connotation, I think science has quite strongly shown there is that which is above the physical: the action between energy and matter is intriguing.
What for ME is a huge question of interest is whether all of this brainy proving isn’t just recasting something people have felt and have been trying to describe forever: whether it is possible that the phenomenon of spiritual experience, described however it is described, isn’t an intuitive flash which does, in fact, provide some actual information about the world. But, of course, at such a high level that it’s utterly incomprehensible without a zillion years of education.
Cheryl: Welcome to the discussion. Please don’t worry about science taking the fun out of things: it can’t, and it won’t. Your feelings are your own, and are important, and science can only talk about how you experience those feelings. It can’t invalidate them.
I understand not being horribly interested in meta-analysis like we’re doing here. What works in your life, works in your life! I think most people responding here have something which feels true and works for them, and it really runs the gamut. What I find interesting is how much what we feel is the same, and how different we are with our perceptions of that feeling.
And so, I have questions for you. (Sarah, if you want to speak to some of these things, please do.)
What I would like to know is this: Have you had spiritual connection like I described? Was Christ there in it for you? Does praying or being a member of a congregation help get you there? And how does the sense of connection fold into your experience of some of the “rules” of the Religious Right?
And, I have another question, which is delicate. Please know I don’t mean to offend. What if you were asked to put the bible away? To never look at it or use it again: to not think about what lessons it holds: not to quote it, or use it to help you describe your beliefs. Imagine you were trapped among Buddhists who just wouldn’t understand it: or that you were a Catholic before Prodestantism who wasn’t allowed to read the bible (and you didn’t have a priest nearby, I guess). Would you still feel God in your life? Do you need the bible to experience God, in other words, or is it just that the bible really speaks to feelings that you already have?