Two days in West Texas means not much keeping up with the blogs and news. (Though I have been talking lots of campaign stuff with the sole other Democrat in my family, my first cousin. He and his girlfriend have been working for the Clinton campaign around the country, so we had some interesting discussions. But not so much news-driven.) Which means more time to ponder the bigger themes in life. I found this story interesting—organized religion is in the decline in Canada, and some are laying the responsibility at the door of feminism.
I’ve written plenty before about how my feminism and atheism are closely entwined. Realizing that religion is used as a cheap excuse to oppress women leads to questioning the value of religion leads to realizing that the god stuff is a big fairy tale that has stayed alive because it’s convenient for the powers that be to have it. Interestingly, though, this has little to do with women going through the big questions, and everything to do with the smaller details of what it takes to keep organized religion alive.
Women — the traditional mainstays of institutional religion — in huge numbers abruptly rejected the church’s patriarchal exemplar of them as chaste, submissive “angels in the house” with all of the social and moral responsibility for community and family but none of the authority.
Unable to find acceptable religious role models or religious ideals that were not painful or oppressive, they reconstructed their identities as secular and sexual beings.
As they progressed into university graduate and professional schools and entered the work force, their horizons broadened and they discovered ways of serving that were more valuable than doing dishes and running church picnics.
One of the conundrums of fighting for reproductive justice is that so many women are anti-choice. Now, anyone who looks into the issues realizes that female misogyny is nothing to sneeze at—there’s a real “hate the bitches so no one calls me a bitch” thing going on that has a lot of power—but just on its surface it makes no sense that women are anti-choice in the same numbers men are. Until you look at the churches. Women are the mainstay of churches, the support system, and they have to buy into the B.S. in order to run the picnics and the bake sales and the anti-choice protests. But what happens when women have other options for fulfillment other than contributing unpaid, underthanked labor to religious organizations? They apparently start dropping out and those religions lose their power.
It’s an interesting example of how ideology is intertwined with systems to create oppression.
97 Responses to “Feminism helps collapse religion”
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Ooh, I have been wondering about this for years. How many churches deny women the chance to have any leadership, yet truly depend on them to do all the scutwork–it ain’t like the men are lining up to bring casseroles to church functions or watch kids in daycare.
It would be interesting to see if actual *belief* collapses vs. organized church structures–but of course, for a lot of people there’s no difference between the two.
As women stop allowing themselves to be unpaid/unappreciated labor for charities and social institutions,it will be interesting to see how many of those institutions are able to survive at all.
Anyone who is going to filibuster that “my religion/spirituality informs my feminism/progressivism”, let us know which came first, the religion or the feminism.
Em, I think that organization precedes belief in most cases, honestly. If you read about the histories of religion and about basic psychology, it’s clear that it’s a situation where religion provides benefits, and people believe as ad hoc justification for their acceptance of the benefits/caving to oppression. Where does “I’m not religious, but I’m spiritual” fit into this? Well, it’s not that much different. We still live in a society where being an open atheist is not a great position for receiving the benefit of community support, but if you say you’re spiritual, you get to be both supported by the community because you “respect” their faith by sharing it, but you also don’t have to do anything for it. Again, I believe people are sincere—rationalization is a powerful force, one of the most powerful—but it’s clear to me that the existence of so many people who want to be atheists without being atheists (and therefore are “spiritual”) shows that rationality is winning, albeit slowly.
That organization precedes belief is why arguments about religion hinge so often not on whether or not the religion is right, but whether or not the benefits outweigh the drawbacks. People argue that religion is good vs. religion is bad in its results, even though that argument is a red herring. (If god is a lie, then no matter how useful the lie is, it’s still a lie.) But it shows that people roughly grasp that you determine if religion is useful, and then change your beliefs according to your pragmatic concerns, to best rationalize them.
Ha, when I first read the title, I thought it said “Feminism helps collapse region.” I was going to be impressed at feminism’s renewed military/political power, and I was going to wonder what region experienced a feminist coup.
The church described in the Globe and Mail article is a United Church, which I don’t think runs on the “men have the authority, women do the scutwork” model. The UC has been ordaining women since the ’30s, for one thing. It’s a very progressive church. To my mind it would have been more interesting to read about conservative churches that are losing membership, because that appears to be happening in Canada a lot more than in the States, and I’m curious about the reasons.
Amanda, I disagree with your interpretation of the “spiritual but not religious” thing. I think it’s far more likely that those people have a belief in the divine and the supernatural (energies, spirits, whatever) but don’t feel comfortable with the organization and dogma of religion. It’s a rejection of the institution of religion, not a coward’s atheism.
The church described in the Globe and Mail article is a United Church, which I don’t think runs on the “men have the authority, women do the scutwork” model. The UC has been ordaining women since the ’30s, for one thing. It’s a very progressive church. To my mind it would have been more interesting to read about conservative churches that are losing membership, because that appears to be happening in Canada a lot more than in the States, and I’m curious about the reasons.
Actually the article points out that this is happening across all the mainstream, large churches, including the Catholics and Anglicans. The UCC example is just that, one example, and a good one when you recognize that the UCC doesn’t have a centralized structure, tends to the socially liberal, and was once an example of a huge expansion in membership (the UCC is present in Bermuda, as one example). If it’s happening in the very liberal UCC, which has never really done the “Woman’s place is in the kitchen or on her back” message, then it’s certainly happening to more traditional churches.
But even in the UCC, and I was raised in it, the vast majority of kids went because their mothers insisted. It wasn’t fathers, generally speaking and I know there are many exceptions, who were the ones insisting on the kids going, and if a parent was missing for whatever reason, odds are it was the father.
In other denominations where I grew up, and it was majority Catholic, followed by UCC, then Anglican, and then a few others, it was again the mothers who got the kids out. Quite often they also were the ones who dragged the fathers along. The churches were, quite literally, maintained by women.
Once women lose interest, a death-spiral is inevitable.
Steve Gilliard once pointed out that this was very much true for Black churches in the US: men did the grandstanding but if you wanted to sway the congregation, you talked to the women.
but it’s clear to me that the existence of so many people who want to be atheists without being atheists (and therefore are “spiritual”)
No. People who are “spiritual”, which is a category that includes myself and many other people I know, are generally that way inclined because they have had spiritual experiences. The intensity of those experiences may vary– I used to be a fervently sceptical atheist myself and it took a lot of really strange shit to make me let go of that. But most people have had something happen, some shift in perception, that put them on a spiritual path.
I can believe that where you are there might be some people who say they’re spiritual and actually are wanna be atheists, but I don’t know anyone like that (and Ireland, especially Northern Ireland where I’m from, is not particularly noted for religious broadmindedness) and I can’t believe it’s a majority of self described “spiritual” people anywhere.
There is certainly no continuum from belief in organised religion to “spiritual” to atheist, as you’re implying.
PS just so it’s clear where I’m coming from, I am a secularist and very happy to see organised religion collapsing, as would be most of the “spiritual” types I know.
I wish I agreed. I think that spirituality-not-religion is on the rise mostly because of desire for personal liberation, but this desire need not correlate with rationality. A commitment to rationality necessitates work, such as researching one’s cognitive biases, which can be counterintuitive and not obviously rewarding. Personal liberation seems incentive enough to account for nonspecific spirituality.
I’d be interested in hypotheses of why more women than men seem to be interested in churchgoing.
Grammar RWA: There are a lot of people who go to church out of a sense of obligation rather than fervent belief, and, in traditional-roles-based marriages, the wife is the one who is responsible for taking care of social obligations (sending out cards; organizing weddings, birthdays, & funerals; doing volunteer work, and so on). Often, too, church attendance is about making sure the kids go so that they’re “raised right”, and again, childcare is generally fobbed off on women.
that little girl in the accompanying graphic has the strangest body english going on…..
I don’t know about Canada, but I live in the USA’s deep South (SC, to be precise). And women here are the driving force behind churches, especially fundamentalist Southern Baptist churches, which (as the article astutely points out) are the mainstays of a religion that advocates keeping them subjugated.
My take on why this is has always been that (especially in the south) the church has always been the socially acceptable way for a woman to build friendships and relationships that have nothing to do with family and/or marriage. Want an escape from your husband to hang out with the girls a few nights a week? Bars aren’t socially acceptable (alcohol and sin OMG!), so join a women’s bible study, and treat it like a gossip group, or girl’s night out. I know countless women who are heavily involved in churches because they don’t know any other way to have a social life that’s acceptable to society at large. In many small towns, there are no such things as knitting clubs or Red Hat Ladies groups: the church is the only way for a woman to seek fulfillment outside of her marriage (or for a single woman, the only socially acceptable place to meet men). I’ve often had girl friends tell me that they’d stop going to church, but (especially if they were raised religious) they don’t understand that there are any other options for being social outside of that paradigm.
I would expect, from observing my mother’s generation (women in their sixties-seventies, almost all of them former school teachers, college professors, or college-educated professionals of some other type) that the driving force isn’t necessarily feminism per se for a lot of women. Rather, a woman who works a full time job doesn’t have time for much involvement in Church beyond going to services. Especially if she has kids.
When I was little and Mom was a stay at home mom, she was heavily involved in Church stuff. Once she started having to teach after my third sister was born, that was cut back hugely. And the same for her various friends.
Given the shift from a relatively small number of women working full-time outside the home in the 1950s to the current state where most women have or will work full-time, I expect a lot of women just don’t have time for it, whether they want to or not.
I lost religion at about age 12 when I realized that all the church was doing to me, as a woman, was shitting on me. I was actually in the first generation of girls who were even allowed to be altar servers (had to stop calling them “altar boys,” oh no) after the Pope gave the thumbs-up. So I could be a priest’s lackey, but I, unlike the boys I served with, could never be a priest. I would argue with the teachers in my CCD class–why can’t I be a priest? Why do I have to have children if I don’t want them? Why is abortion such a sin? Why why why why why? And they never had any good answers. Just a lot of, “Cuz God said so.”
One of the priests was really nice and progressive and all. I think all the rest, including the married one, were assholes. I bet it all sounds good to young boys to hear “wives, obey your husbands,” or however that passage goes. But to young women who are deciding just how they want to shape their lives, hearing, “IF YOU DO NOT HAVE CHILDREN AFTER MARRIAGE, IT IS A TERRIBLE TERRIBLE SIN!” … it kinda pushes us away. And also, hearing how “God loves you, but since you’re a woman, he thinks you’re a dipshit,” kinda does it too.
Bon, did the relatively nice progressive priest have any somewhat more intelligent and straightforward answers to your tough questions, or was he just better at keeping you from wanting to ask them?
I was a moral coward when I was a Catholic kid. I had all sorts of doubts and dissents, but I spouted the party line of the conservative wing of the Church all down the line. I even felt compelled to recant on Darwinism to some degree (which I honestly thought was just plain common sense) in the face of some old Encyclical from some early-20th Century Pope (Leo some Roman numeral or other, possibly X, I think) put out mandating that all Catholics believe that all humanity is descended from one man and one woman, aka “Adam and Eve.” I came up with some horrendously silly and Rube Goldbergian and rather morally horrifying compromise for a paper we had to write in Catholic HS on what we believed about evolution vs creation.
At least that time I knew I was telling sleazy lies to avoid getting excommunicated (and I got graded accordingly too) but I lived in Doublethink City on most issues.
So I think that if any of the priests I ever met actually were intelligent and progressive, I’d have avoided any serious talk about faith and doctrine with them like plague, for fear of exposing myself to myself.
It makes it hard for me to judge whether such priests are themselves tangled up in a cat’s-cradle of ideological rationalization or have a clear and honest vision of things.
But the ones who had clearly screwed-up ideas could always be pretty forthright about them.
None of this proves to me that spirituality as such is nothing more than a halfway-house between abject submission to religious tyranny and the Olympian club of freethinking atheists. I really think, based on my own limited but significant (to me, anyway) experience, that it is something else, off to the side of these polarizations.
But I hardly set myself up as some kind of authority in the matter!
Still, I can’t resist asking you, Grammar RWA, if you really are such a paragon of the hard work of committment to rationality, if you couldn’t reasonably have offered a hypothesis of your own re women’s churchgoing based on the comment just a few above your own:
Well, there you have it–the churches tend (with some glaring exceptions to be sure) to be places where women have some de facto power and status. In a traditional Christian church to be sure that status and influence is overshadowed by the official supremacy of male-dominated church officials and subordinated to a fundamentally patriarchial world-view, and thus these women are co-opted. But given that women are going to be overshadowed, dominated, subordinated, co-opted, used, etc, which is the default assumption in a patriarchial dominator society like ours whatever the sphere, this deal with the devil may well look like the best deal in town, and the church ladies make the most of it.
This is largely just a more cynical recasting of what Carole said (that women might cling to the churches just for the chance to be social at all) but I’m emphasizing that they do in fact negotiate themselves some real power and clout within those cloisters, and this can account for much of the tenacity of conservative religious ideology for these women despite its obvious misogyny. It’s a nasty game, and the house wins more than they do, but they know how to play it well, so why give it up?
But I suppose this is just misty-headed rambling from my spirit-clouded brain, and it is obvious to y’all who are past masters at unpacking your own cognitive biases why it is silly and irrelevant, since you sat there puffing away at your pipe in puzzlement after Keith had already supplied the evidence. Which an atheistic Sherlock like yourself, Grammar RWA, could hardly have overlooked unless it had of course no significance.
I think it’s far more likely that those people have a belief in the divine and the supernatural (energies, spirits, whatever) but don’t feel comfortable with the organization and dogma of religion.
I tend to think that belief in the divine is 75% social pressure and 25% ego/fear of death, though. At least the whys, though. I have no doubt once belief has settled in and the rationalizing kicks in, it’s sincere. But if the root causes of religion (social pressure) were gone, religion and compromise positions like spirituality would disappear.
Elinor, even churches that don’t rely on the female submission model still tend to rely on women’s unpaid labor and extra devotion.
People who are “spiritual”, which is a category that includes myself and many other people I know, are generally that way inclined because they have had spiritual experiences.
I reiterate—I believe people are sincere once they’ve decided to believe. We all rationalize the paths we’ve chosen, and we all do it in a way that makes us feel very sincerely. My sense that belief is dopey is, at least in part, a rationalization for my utter distaste for religion. You chose another path.
My take on why this is has always been that (especially in the south) the church has always been the socially acceptable way for a woman to build friendships and relationships that have nothing to do with family and/or marriage. Want an escape from your husband to hang out with the girls a few nights a week?
I hope that’s true, and for some women in might be in part, but I don’t think it’s generally so self-affirming. I think it’s for the same reasons that women do most child-rearing and housework—keeping the family’s name up in the community and keeping them right with god and raising the children right is women’s work.
It’s a rejection of the institution of religion, not a coward’s atheism.
Since I was old enough to reject the institution of religion, I identified myself as “spiritual, but not religious,” particularly in the context of online dating or any forum that required a public declaration. Just a few years ago (at 38) I shed my cowardly “spiritual” cloak in lock step with my professional development as a psychotherapist. My willingness to “cover” (a term I am stealing from a NY Times Mag story: The Pressure to Cover Kenji Yoshino, January 15, 2006) was tied to pressures I felt to be accepted, admired, loved, etcetera. The list is long and very typically female. I think the story in the Times actually pushed me to consider why I was hiding and what social pressures encouraged the covering. I changed my online dating profile to be true to my beliefs. Coming out as an “atheist” reduced my dating hits by 90% (no exaggeration). The happy ending? An unabashed atheist found me.
I was raised in the United Church of Canada. My mother chose it after leaving the Catholic church due to its sexism. It was a great church and a great community, very progressive and open. My particular church hired the first openly gay man to be ordained in Canada (other ministers had come out after their ordinations, he was the first to do it the other way around). When the minister who succeeded him noted their were only girls in the membership class (theologically similar to Catholic confirmation, but in practice much less formal), she decided to make it a class in feminist theology. But I dropped out partway through, not willing to make the solemn declaration at the end that I believed in God. A few years later the church collapsed and shut down due to lack of membership and money. I had left for university, but was still saddened by the loss of an inclusive community and a powerful progressive organization. But I also understand why it fell apart, I don’t believe in God or the very light, non-dogmatic doctrine of this church.
I noticed the use of “pure laine”, without scare quotes, in the Globe and Mail article. I’m surprised and somewhat shocked; it’s an incredibly racist term. It’s French for “pure wool” and is used by racist Quebecois to differentiate themselves from the more recent arrivals, who are less “pure.”
You’re getting shit for this, so I figured I’d chime in: this is exactly my experience. I’m an atheist now. It took a while.
It’s a rejection of the institution of religion, not a coward’s atheism.
Since I was old enough to reject the institution of religion, I identified myself as “spiritual, but not religious,” particularly in the context of online dating or any forum that required a public declaration. Just a few years ago (at 38) I shed my cowardly “spiritual” cloak in lock step with my professional development as a psychotherapist. My willingness to “cover” (a term I am stealing from a NY Times Mag story: The Pressure to Cover Kenji Yoshino, January 15, 2006) was tied to pressures I felt to be accepted, admired, loved, etcetera. The list is long and very typically female. I think the story in the Times actually pushed me to consider why I was hiding and what social pressures encouraged the covering. I changed my online dating profile to be true to my beliefs. Coming out as an “atheist” reduced my dating hits by 90% (no exaggeration). The happy ending? An unabashed atheist found me.
Dremarr, is that article available for free somewhere?
The article is in the NYTimes online archives.
To clarify my comments about rationalizing above, now that I’ve had my coffee, I meant this: When people say that they’re spiritual because of “experiences”, they’re making the incorrect assumption that we meanie atheists are emotionally anemic and that we’ve never had such experiences. Incorrect. I’ve felt the electric love of another person, the warm feeling of oneness with the world on a warm day, silent astonishment at great beauty. What’s different is that I’m not pre-inclined to read supernatural meaning into these events, so I interpret them through an atheist paradigm, as results of the natural world. If I were pre-inclined to seek reassurance of belonging through dedication to the myth of the supernatural, those experiences would become “proof” of god and my own spirituality. That’s what I mean by rationalization.
Don’t forget the role of education. One of the biggest components in women’s progress has been better access to education, and it’s been known for years that religious belief correlates negatively with education.
But I also understand why it fell apart, I don’t believe in God or the very light, non-dogmatic doctrine of this church.
Heh. Just over a decade back I was working at a local cable station in Fredericton and one day we went out to interview an Anglican minister (pillar of the community, et cetera and so on) whose daughter was running a successful day care program. It wasn’t a religious interview, dealing instead with the need for more and better daycare programs in smaller communities. We were taking a break and the subject of religion came up, and when he asked I said I was United Church (this was when I was still calling myself agnostic).
This guy was old time Anglican: against gay ministers, (and don’t even mention gay marriage–of course, this was the 1990s), even female ministers. He snorted in derision when I answered and said people should belong to a church that actually believed in something.
What’s different is that I’m not pre-inclined to read supernatural meaning into these events, so I interpret them through an atheist paradigm, as results of the natural world. If I were pre-inclined to seek reassurance of belonging through dedication to the myth of the supernatural, those experiences would become “proof” of god and my own spirituality.
If it’s all pre-inclination, doesn’t pluralism require us not to care too much about religion vs. atheism? Liberalism usually requires us to take things that we are born into as positions that must be respected as part of identity. Not in all cases, but usually. I think that if you argue religion is basically something you are or aren’t born with (or born predisposed to), then you have to be very tolerant of religion. You can differentiate between UCC and the SBC, but past that I’m not so sure.
I’m not so sure if this is right, so help would be lovely!
Pluralism requires us to be tolerant of people we disagree with. It doesn’t require us to insult each other’s intelligence. I’m an atheist. I could insult your intelligence and pretend that doesn’t mean I think religious belief is silly and make-believe, but do you really want me to insult your intelligence? (You=the general you. Not necessarily you specifically, Noah.)
Pre-inclined doesn’t mean “born that way”. It is an active choice. You can choose to be rational about your experiences, or you can choose to interpret them in a way that is irrational but more likely to get you social rewards. Depends on your priorities, which shift all the time for people. For instance, the “spiritual” people on this thread who went atheist report roughly what I’d suspect—other people’s approval fell in priorities compared to being rational, and they changed their religious feelings.
Environment is a big thing. I am an atheist in no small part because I don’t get abused for it on a regular basis. I have friends, love, support despite my atheism. If we want more atheists, we need to speak up and create more space for people to feel like they will survive questioning the bullshit.
As concerns women and church going - one reason men desert the church, or form rather weird church groups of their own, seems to be the lack of ‘masculine’ virtues in many christian churches. Even though a lot of places try, it’s hard to avoid realising that the virtues preached by the gospel - love, caring, concern for others, humility - are perceived as feminine. Western constructions of masculinity clashes with these virtues. Sometimes I wonder if that’s why churches preach the superiority of men so loudly - you have to do soemthing to cover up that uncomfortable clash.
I don’t present myself as a jewel of the Enlightenment. I am aware of my psychological shortcomings, and consequently I manage to avoid unwarranted certainty sometimes, but that’s about it. Expressing awareness of obstacles does not imply a claim of overcoming said obstacles. I make no such claim.
As to womens’ churchgoing, I have a half-baked hypothesis, but it’s nothing I’d want to be seen bringing to the potluck. I asked because right now I’m much more interested in others’ ideas. KeithM certainly had the seed of one plausible answer.
I like you, Mark Foxwell. If there’s anything I need to do to avoid being the target of your sarcasm, please let me know.
KeithM., why am I not surprised this was in Fredericton? (I’m in that fine little burg right now.)
Also, I think I know which Anglican church you’re talking about. It’s next door to me. (Very, very small world.)
I used to consider myself an atheist. I now don’t, though I still do not believe in deities. I certainly don’t consider myself a coward for such, and if anything, have grown more inquiring and skeptical over the years. I think organized religion ultimately does far more harm than good, but I do have a belief in the supernatural.
Yeah, I once had this completely amazing, scales-falling-from-eyes, conversion-level experience of the sudden, inescapable, absolute knowledge that Jimi Hendrix was the new messiah. (And I wasn’t even on drugs at the time.)
The difference is, some of us know that just because you feel something to be true in every cell of your body, that doesn’t actually mean that it is true.
“I’ve written plenty before about how my feminism and atheism are closely entwined. Realizing that religion is used as a cheap excuse to oppress women leads to questioning the value of religion leads to realizing that the god stuff is a big fairy tale that has stayed alive because it’s convenient for the powers that be to have it.”
I came to paganism via anthropology classes, some eastern psychology, and humanism.
What you’ve written here is true, but religion is also a big fairy tale that supports resistance to powers that be.
The anthro class called it ‘religions of the status quo’ vs ‘religions of revolution.’
I’m sure there are various people who’ve pointed out the civil rights movement, Ghandi’s faith and etc. etc.
As a once and future Wobbly, the IWW ran up against religion and the Preacher and the Slave is spot on.
I ask for people to divide the two strands of religion - oppressive and insurrectionary. They can become the one and the other - the pre-Roman Church was insurrectionary, the liberation theology movement was as well. The examples of oppressive religion are legion, however.
So do I think that Athena blesses my community organizing work? Yep. Do I think that’s a made-up fairy tale? Yep. Does it matter to me anyway? Yep.
Funny thing, humans.
How does that work? If Athena is a human invention and exists only as myth, how can she bless your work or do anything at all?
When people say that they’re spiritual because of “experiences”, they’re making the incorrect assumption that we meanie atheists are emotionally anemic and that we’ve never had such experiences. Incorrect. I’ve felt the electric love of another person, the warm feeling of oneness with the world on a warm day, silent astonishment at great beauty. What’s different is that I’m not pre-inclined to read supernatural meaning into these events
Gah.
I repeat, I was an atheist. And the kind of experiences you refer to here are, strangely enough, the kind of experiences I was also capable of having as an atheist, and did not require me to uproot my whole belief system and spend a couple of years convinced I must be going crazy, as that was a more parsimonious explanation of what was happening than the explanation that “spiritual” stuff might be true. While I am not inclined to go into details about the kind of experiences I was referring to, “shift in perception” should just about cover it. And I am not trying to convince you of the validity and meaningfulness of these experiences, but just to point out that your grasp of the psychology involved is faulty.
“When people say that they’re spiritual because of “experiences”, they’re making the incorrect assumption that we meanie atheists are emotionally anemic and that we’ve never had such experiences. Incorrect. I’ve felt the electric love of another person, the warm feeling of oneness with the world on a warm day, silent astonishment at great beauty. What’s different is that I’m not pre-inclined to read supernatural meaning into these events”
Agreed. 100% agreed. Everyone has “experiences”, not everyone is inclined to credit them to convenienty “unknowable”, completely unverifiable hogwash.
_____
“While I am not inclined to go into details about the kind of experiences I was referring to”
What interests me is why *everyone* who claims to be a once-upon-a-time atheist, *NEVER* wants to go into detail about what made them change their minds. I’m always intersted in what would make someone turn or return to “spiritalism” or religion - not out of a desire to attack and destroy, but out of sheer curiosity, yet no one ever wants to explain it. It’s maddening.
Betty, here’s how it happens.
To Grammar:
Cognitive dissonance
Cognitive dissonance -
I’m not sure I understand this concept well. In this example, does it mean that an atheist, having experienced something that to them doesn’t jive with that outlook, will opt for “spiritual” explainations for some reason?
Yeah, I’m not solid on cognitive dissonance. I get understand the concept, just not how it applies in real life.
I was given to understand that that isn’t a good assumption, because in the States, the hyperconservative evangelical megachurches (which are actually far LESS traditional than churches like the UCC, in some ways) have grown as the mainline Protestant churches have shrunk. If Canada is different, I’m interested in learning why.
I’ve read it suggested that some people turn from liberal churches to more conservative churches (if that’s what is happening) because they want to be provided with rules and authorities to follow and (the cynic in me says) some kind of concrete reason to lord it over outsiders, and that liberal touchy-feely churches don’t provide that kind of framework. But that’s just one theory, and maybe not a very good one.
yet no one ever wants to explain it. It’s maddening.
Yeah, I can see that, and I would feel precisely the same way if I had retained my atheism. Understanding how things work, and what makes people tick, is really important to me, and that’s why I found it so heinously difficult to give up a worldview I understood for one where I don’t intellectually understand the world any more.
The thing is, and I don’t think me saying this will actually make the situation less aggravating, that you can’t explain this stuff. Even where the vocabulary exists, it means different things to different people, and it is utterly meaningless to an atheist. Spiritual experiences, of any kind, have to actually be experienced not explained.
I will say that it’s not “coincidences” because, seriously, the people who think it’s just about having your best friend call you at the same moment you’re thinking about her therefore ZOMG TELEPATHY can fuck right off; it’s not like it’s that difficult to arrive at a rational analysis of the probablity of a coincidence.
“Even where the vocabulary exists, it means different things to different people, and it is utterly meaningless to an atheist.”
Makes sense, though I’m not sure I’d say any such thing is utterly meaningless to an atheist. The sentiment, maybe, but we understand the words.
I do have questions though, and feel free to ignore them if they’re too personal (I have a hard time telling occasionaly): Atheism isn’t about having all the answers, or any answers for that matter. It’s all about what can be proven. So, why would these experiences make you abandon atheism as opposed to just filing them in the “weird, cool but unexplainable” drawer? Do you have explainations (no need to be specific) that are decidedly non-atheistic in nature?
So, why would these experiences make you abandon atheism as opposed to just filing them in the “weird, cool but unexplainable” drawer? Do you have explainations (no need to be specific) that are decidedly non-atheistic in nature?
The atmosphere of the thread is not exactly conducive to being shary, but I’ll do my best! The most I feel comfortable with saying is that the experiences themselves were non-materialistic, non-physical in nature. The explanations, obviously, could be physical explanations (”there is an evolutionary advantage to the human brain being wired to produce this kind of experience”/ “fuck it, I’m clearly going completely mental.”)
But after a certain sort of density of those experiences I just got to the point where I thought “OK, what is the logical reason why I am prioritising the reality of my physical experiences over the reality of my non physical experiences? What, exactly is making me assume that spiritual experience is a subset of physical experience, rather than vice versa?” And I actually didn’t have any compelling reasons for my materialistic assumptions any more, not even Occam’s Razor. So I officially gave up on my atheism at that point, although the mindset kind of stayed with me and occasionally kicked up a massive fuss at all the “woo” I have subjected myself to in the years since.
Thank you for asking nicely! I hope that made some sense, it’s the best I can do.
I hope Amanda doesn’t object too much to the threadjack, I am definitely going to shut up now.
The most I feel comfortable with saying is that the experiences themselves were non-materialistic, non-physical in nature.
I don’t understand how you would know that. How you could know that.
I disagree that these ideas are meaningless to atheists. The previous half century has given us considerable evidence that spiritual experiences can be induced by entheogenic chemicals (psilocybin being perhaps the most well-known). Secular meditation can produce related (if less intense) effects. Anyone can have these experiences; belief is unnecessary.
I suspect there are many religious/spiritual people to whom the vocabulary of experience is gibberish, because while they believe what they’ve heard, they have never felt that they were transcending self, time or space.
So I would not expect that theism reliably implies spiritual experience, or that atheism implies a lack thereof.
Perhaps I should be surprised that I can lose awareness of being in my body at this point in history, have the distinct sensation that the universe itself is conscious, listen to it and learn things that I might otherwise not have intuited, and yet not interpret this necessarily as evidence that there really is a higher consciousness out there. But I am no longer surprised.
Oh, if others are asking you to take the discussion in a particular direction, it can hardly be called a threadjack. And we can’t very well talk about the constrasts between religion, spirituality, and atheism without asking why some people become spiritual.
Like Grammar, I think there’s really no truth to the idea that being atheist somehow abdicates spirituality.
It just depends on what you mean by it. Do I think that spiritual experiences aren’t possible? No, of course not; anybody familiar with the martial arts, or other areas where flow state can be achieved, understands that it’s possible to transcend time and space, and your own body.
Or at least, to feel like you are. I don’t see why any of that is inconsistent with consciousness being a function of a physical universe, or any other conclusions from atheism. Spirituality doesn’t have to be literally about spirits. It’s just a form of self-knowledge. It’s not inconsistent with atheism.
Atheists aren’t any less spiritual than anybody else. We just don’t make the unsupportable conclusion that our spiritual experiences prove the existence of spirits, or whatever.
Where the hell did I say I was talking about flow states? I wasn’t. Oh wait , you probably got that from “the human brain is wired…” I don’t think that a flow state is the only kind of spiritual experience a human brain is wired to produce; I was actually referring to shamanic trance with that thought.
Atheists aren’t any less spiritual than anybody else. We just don’t make the unsupportable conclusion that our spiritual experiences prove the existence of spirits, or whatever.
Um. interaction with various non physical forms of consciousness is key to the kind of experience I was actually referring to. And pretty much anyone who calls themselves “spiritual” at all will have that kind of interaction, often at quite an everyday level of consciousness. It’s not just about flow states; it’s about direct experience of the non physical. Difference. And since I already intended to bow out of the conversation, I will restate my intention to do so– I just felt I had to correct the misapprehension here.
If you can interact with it, it MUST be physical. Sure, I’ve only taken insect physiology. But that has given me a basic understanding of how sensory cells and neurons function, and I can tell you that all information that we receive is physical. Spirits or whatever mumbo-jumbo you think you’re interacting with violate the laws of physics. I’m sorry if that pisses you off or if you can’t understand it, but that’s how the world we live in works.
I’m sorry if that pisses you off or if you can’t understand it
This is why I didn’t want to get drawn into this thread. See comment 42 where I already covered this part– sorry if you can’t understand it, but if you’re up to working through the logical consequences of what I’m saying you’ll see that your objection is covered.
And no, you missing a point that wasn’t conveniently spelt out for you with big coloured alphabet blocks doesn’t piss me off. Your patronising attitude? Yeah, that did the job nicely. And once again I get sufficiently annoyed to bother with this conversation. I’m thinking it’s hormones.
What’s different is that I’m not pre-inclined to read supernatural meaning into these events, so I interpret them through an atheist paradigm, as results of the natural world.
There may be a definition issue here: I don’t separate “spirituality” from “the natural world”. (One major issue I had with Christian religion was insistence on the separation of “God” from the natural world.) I guess to me, “spirituality” is a poor description for some manifestations of consciousness that we haven’t been able to sufficiently decipher yet.
What interests me is why *everyone* who claims to be a once-upon-a-time atheist, *NEVER* wants to go into detail about what made them change their minds.
Once you put it on paper, it becomes more obvious that it was all in your mind, and possibly chemical in nature. If LSD can make people see weird shit that seems real, it’s not impossible for hormones your body generates to do the same. I’ve definitely had stone sober hallucinations brought on by fatigue, misperceptions, etc., but again, my dedication to being an atheist inclined me to seek out the natural explanation instead of jumping to the supernatural hopes.
Without the specifics (an angel came down and took me to heaven to meet my dead aunt, which is in no way like being kidnapped by make-believe aliens during my sleep), it’s hard to say how these supernatural experiences differ from momentary divergences from your usual ability to keep your perceptions of reality consistent. I would like to see the physical evidence for these god experiences that are very real.
But if the root causes of religion (social pressure) were gone, religion and compromise positions like spirituality would disappear.
In the absence of organized religion, those with spiritual inclinations are going to be more likely to channel their experiences into what we generally refer to as superstitions– healing by way of “energy manipulation,” attempts to contact “the other side,” etc.
People who are firm in their atheism aren’t going to give in to such temptations, but I think you’re a little quick to just wave your hands and claim that people would “default” to rationalist atheism in the absence of a society where organized religion is very common.
You could argue that social pressure feeds into spiritualism in general, but that’s a social pressure that’s going to exist regardless of whether “traditional” western religions are commonly practiced. What you’re going to have is groups of “spiritual people” forming their own self-made groups– it’s just going to be more common and more fractured in the absence of “default” spiritual outlets of mainline Christianity that was the norm in the US for a long time.
Where the hell did I say I was talking about flow states? I wasn’t.
Gosh, Kali, do you suppose for just a second that there’s conversations going on here in a context a little larger than just yourself and your comments? Jesus Christ you’re acting like a jackass all of a sudden.
Um. interaction with various non physical forms of consciousness is key to the kind of experience I was actually referring to.
You never answered my question, I guess. What could possibly lead you, defensibly, to believe that you actually had any interaction with any non-physical form of consciousness?
Because, you see, there’s no such thing. All consciousness is physical. So the burden of evidence is quite steep for a reasonable person to conclude that you had contact with one that wasn’t.
And I don’t understand why you would rush to a conclusion that isn’t supported by enough evidence to convince a reasonable person, since by definition that would mean you were believing unreasonably.
Why choose to be unreasonable? I don’t get it.
See comment 42 where I already covered this part–
You didn’t write comment 42, Kali. And certainly none of your comments address Ento’s objection in the slightest. You have only physical senses. Thus, if you’re interacting with someone, that someone must be physical. The human brain has no metaphysical antenna, all the input channels are physical.
I keep waiting for someone to defend their woo with a real argument, real evidence - and yes, things that happened to you can be real evidence, no need to keep it all such a fuckin’ secret - but all I ever seem to see from believers is invective. Why is that?
I’m glad Kali and nihilix jumped in to “testify” a little for the non-atheist yet non-oppressive-organized-religion population, because so often these sorts of threads *do* feel very unwelcoming to those of us who fit that description.
I’m coming from the Wiccan point of view, which typically puts me smack between fundamentalists telling me I’m going to hell and atheists telling me I’m stupid and irrational and immature.
Now, I know it is impossible, for instance, to prove that I’m hard-wired for belief in Gods and such, because anyone can say to me, “Oh, you just think that because you were raised in a society that disapproves of atheism.” (But if you think it was easier to tell my Catholic family that I was leaving their church for Wicca rather than for atheism, I think you are assuming too much about my family. *g*)
And I will never have answers to such questions as Chet asked Kali that would satisfy the asker. Personally, I’m convinced that the mindset that makes one an atheist disinclines the atheist to be satisfied with any self-description someone like myself or Kali or nihilix could give. And that’s fine. That’s why some people are atheists. If I could describe myself in a way that made sense to you, it would probably only be because you weren’t an atheist.
I’m OK with that. What I’m not so happy with (for whatever it’s worth; it isn’t my blog, after all) is the way this disconnect leads to a hostile environment for the non-atheist. I mean, immediately after Kali spoke up, she was getting grilled and then lectured and pretty much being told that she was a less reliable witness to her own internal states than Random J. Atheist on the thread was. It’s natural, I guess, given the atheistic emphasis on proof and physicality, but… those of us who have religious beliefs don’t see any sense in trying to prove them or in calling those experiences physical. And generally when we pipe up it’s not to try to convince people of stuff other than “hey, not everyone with a religion is anti-feminist!”–and the demands that we defend our spiritual choices aren’t what we’d expect to get from people we’d thought we’d have something in common with, to wit, all of us being opposed to the would-be theocrats who want to shove their religion down our throats.
I’m not trying to convince people of anything about my internal states. I’m not here to “defend my woo.” I don’t need to defend it, anymore than I would expect anyone here to defend their atheism.
And I do understand that simply believing in a Deity at all lumps me in with the worst sort of fundamentalist, in many of your minds. OK.
I could wish that my, or Kali’s, or any religious person’s simple expression of personal experience be met with respect–”Oh, so that’s how it is for you? Interesting”–rather than the third degree, a la Chet’s rather hostile screed just above.
At the very least, though, I’d like to ask that these sorts of discussions didn’t, right from the get-go, synonymize “religion” with “organized religion” or “oppressive religion” or “fundamentalist Christianity.” Even if the study you’re talking about makes the same mistake. Yes, OK, like fundamentalists Christians and unlike you, us Goddess-worshipping Wiccan feminists believe in something you would call “an imaginary being.” We also call our system of belief “a religion” just like they do (except for the ones who get all coy and say “oh, I don’t have a religion, I have a personal relationship with Jesus. Pheh on them.)
That’s sort of where the similarity ends, really. Quite a few people in my religious community identify with it precisely because it is compatible with their feminism, in fact.
I try not to make posts like this too often. I love reading this blog (and Pharyngula too) and I don’t want our gracious hostess to sigh with exasperation every time my name comes up in comment threads. *g* But maybe that’s my mistake; maybe if people like me and Kali and nihilx stood up more often as a counterexample to the generalization that “religion=patriarchy,” maybe people would make that generalization less often. Or maybe at the very least people making the generalization would explain why they don’t see Wiccans and other Pagans and other non-organized religious people as exceptions.
Thanks, comment 56. Because I was just about to use some “invective” and it’s kind of nice to have you sitting there as a counterexample to
but all I ever seem to see from believers is invective. Why is that?
Hilariously, I think this is meant to imply some kind of answer related to the psychological defects of “believers” rather than “duh, your attitude.” You talk to people in that way, and you bet your bum you’ll eventually see some “invective.” However, if you really want to characterise everything I have written in the thread so far as “invective” I have to say that your attitude is rather paranoid and skewed.
You didn’t write comment 42, Kali. And certainly none of your comments address Ento’s objection in the slightest. You have only physical senses. Thus, if you’re interacting with someone, that someone must be physical. The human brain has no metaphysical antenna, all the input channels are physical.
I guess someone without the wherewithal to mentally correct a typo probably shouldn’t be expected to understand that this is an argument against dualism, and that I almost-explicitly said I didn’t subscribe to any form of dualism in comment 45. But I’m not going to connect the dots for you.
You never answered my question, I guess. What could possibly lead you, defensibly, to believe that you actually had any interaction with any non-physical form of consciousness?
I did, in this. “OK, what is the logical reason why I am prioritising the reality of my physical experiences over the reality of my non physical experiences? What, exactly is making me assume that spiritual experience is a subset of physical experience, rather than vice versa?”
For me, based on my personal experiences, atheism wasn’t the parsimonious assumption any more.
You want the detailed 10 year history that took me to that point? No, not even if you’d asked nicely. For starters, as I have said continually, most of it’s not amenable to verbal description. But that’s how it is.
Thank you for being such a phenomenal jackass– it gave me the opportunity to vent a bit of unrelated irritation without snapping at someone I care about. All the best!
I’m sorry you missed the memo.
I hope it isn’t rude for me to point you toward the previous atheism thread’s comments 125, 132 and 138. I tried to address this in those posts, but I probably shouldn’t copy/paste them here.
It’s helpful to be precise, yes. I do think all religion is oppressive, though. Show me a religion that has neither a creator deity nor an afterlife, and I’ll reconsider. A creator deity means that this world and our lives are only important because of the actions of some other, greater consciousness, and thus we are not inherently valuable. An afterlife means that this life is not enough, and need not be truly cherished or fully lived, because it’s just preparation for something else that is more important; again, humans in our present form are not inherently valuable. Both these outlooks are oppressive, because they degrade the human spirit.
I think that kali was the target of undeserved condescension. The “I’m sorry if that pisses you off or if you can’t understand it” stuff was gratuitous. (Kali, I’m also not sure that you’re explaining yourself as clearly as you think you are. I’m not going through your posts with a fine-toothed comb to find points to challenge. But I’m really not understanding how you aren’t a dualist.) I suspect the dams of civility cannot be rebuilt now in this thread’s climate, unfortunately.
That said, I don’t think that beliefs are inherently worthy of respect. The posts in the last thread that I mentioned are meant to address this. Racism is important and meaningful to racists, but that’s not sufficient reason to respect such beliefs. That’s not to say that your beliefs are tantamount to racism, but I do think the baseline is “no inherent respect”, and one works upward from there. If there are reasons to respect your beliefs, those reasons can be explained, and I need to hear them. Which brings us to:
See, this might point to a rather basic disagreement between us. I think it’s perfectly reasonable of you to expect atheists to defend their atheism. I think it’s not only reasonable, but necessary for your intellectual honesty, at least until you are satisfied that atheism can be robustly defended. I don’t think the world is a better place when we all let bullshit slip past us, unchallenged. You shouldn’t have to defend your woo if you keep your woo entirely to yourself. But the moment you mention it to anyone else, you should be prepared to defend it, the same as someone who says “I think global warming is a hoax” should be prepared to defend that statement. All claims are legitimately subject to criticism.
I agree with you. There’s no need to be hostile, and when people get hostile toward progressive god-botherers, I find that distasteful and I don’t want a part of it. I think it’s important, though, to recognize that criticism is not hostility. There has been some of both in this thread, but I hope we aren’t mistaking one for the other. In every other realm of discourse (politics, science, football), asking someone “how do you know that” is not considered hostility. It is unfair to demand different standards for religious discourse.
Don’t tell yourself this; it is an artificial barrier to conversation. At least in America, I’m pretty sure most atheists are former theists. We can understand you if we understood ourselves.
I do think the baseline is “no inherent respect”, and one works upward from there. If there are reasons to respect your beliefs, those reasons can be explained, and I need to hear them.
First of all, I don’t believe anyone is entitled to such explanations, and that sense of entitlement you have is what’s chapping people’s asses, here. Look, I believe that “ideas have consequences” more than most people, but, you know, Wiccans never bothered me a lick. In part because the consequences of some ideas which you might regard as “indefensible” are pretty inconsequential, compared to the consequences of other, more “defensible” ideas.
What we have here is a bunch of “Well, I identify as X, so being X must be part and parcel of my other belief Y and everyone who doesn’t believe Y isn’t ‘really’ X.”
Grammar RWA - there’s a little bit of a double-bind in the situation here as you describe it. People who believe in the existence of something beyond the physical must either be lumped in with the fundies and all of organized religion without saying anything, or, if we say anything at all, we must be prepared to defend our beliefs against all comers.
I don’t care if you believe what I do, honest. (For the record I believe in neither a creator nor an afterlife.) I would like not to have my rationality be automatically suspect because the drawer of “I don’t know what caused this” got big enough for me to think that there might be something in there, even if I have little idea what it is.
“Once you put it on paper, it becomes more obvious that it was all in your mind, and possibly chemical in nature.”
That’s precisely it, I think. Because -
“I would like to see the physical evidence for these god experiences that are very real.”
and
“I keep waiting for someone to defend their woo with a real argument, real evidence - and yes, things that happened to you can be real evidence, no need to keep it all such a fuckin’ secret - but all I ever seem to see from believers is invective. Why is that?”
This is cause for concern for someone who wants to believe what they experienced is “spiritual” in nature. Having to commit the experiences to words means making them real, in the sense that they can now be shared. And that means they are open to criticism and, more to the point, better explanations for the experiences than “goddidit”, or whatever.
_______
“I’m not here to “defend my woo.” I don’t need to defend it, anymore than I would expect anyone here to defend their atheism.”
And this is exactly the problem I have with theists. How in the world can your collective response be essentially, “don’t talk about that” every. single. time.?
It is a terrible idea to be silent when confronted with ideas one rejects with ever fiber of their moral being. It cannot be asked that we be silent on matters of religion or spirituality or whatever. It can’t. If we need to be silent on that, then we can’t challenge a racist on their racism, we can’t challenge a sexist on their sexist opinions. We can’t talk to anyone about anything for fear of offending them. And before anyone accuses me of it - this is not me calling theists any sort of bigots as this works in the reverse as well – if you refuse to talk to us about these things, then we are left with only our assumptions – which is the stuff prejudices are made of.
That sounds profoundly boring, counterproductive and potentially dangerous to me. What good could ever come out of being silent?
Don’t mistake this as my saying there will or needs to be hostility – there doesn’t. We can talk about this without hostility if the atheist understands how important these beliefs are to the believer and the believer understands that attacking faith is not the same as attacking those with faith.
——
” I would like not to have my rationality be automatically suspect because the drawer of “I don’t know what caused this” got big enough for me to think that there might be something in there, even if I have little idea what it is. ”
The problem isn’t that you may believe “there might be something in there”. The problem is believing it with absolutely no logical reason to believe such, or without trying any other explanation at all. Jumping directly into believing you have the whole, entire answer, is the problem.
P.S. Kali - if you happen to read this far down: It was not my intention for you to be attacked. I deeply apologize for that happening. I was (am) geniunely interested in exactly what I said I was interested in - I was not attempting to insult you in anyway. Apologies.
Okay - so if I say right up front that I don’t have the whole entire answer, you don’t have a problem with my beliefs, such as they are?
Based on my completely unscientific personal polling methods, I would say there are a fair number of theists who don’t think they have the answer, or anything close to one. I personally am 99% agnostic, with theistic preferences. In one sense I’m a pretty militant agnostic - I don’t know, and neither do you.
In terms of what I, personally, think is in that drawer, I would say I believe God is an epiphenomenon of a sufficient number of appropriately organized consciousnesses, in much the same way consciousness appears to be an epiphenomenon of a sufficient number of appropriately organized neurons. Which would put God in the class of things that may one day be studied scientifically, but that we don’t yet have tools to look at. Heck, at the moment we can’t prove consciousness in any meaninful way - can’t define it or prove it’s existence beyond the personal - so how would we go about studying an epiphenomenon of it?
“so if I say right up front that I don’t have the whole entire answer, you don’t have a problem with my beliefs, such as they are?”
Of course not. Assuming the traditional caveats - you’re not trying to legislate it, etc.
“I don’t know, and neither do you.”
Prezactly. That’s the difference between atheists and theists, though. Theists are saying they have The Answer(tm), when no one does. I disagree that they don’t think they do. They do think so. What other reason would there be to follow it, if it isn’t?
So, the people who say “you have to respect my beliefs, because they’re my beliefs“, those people don’t have a sense of entitlement? But I do, because I ask them to justify that demand, instead of genuflecting like I’m supposed to? Hmm. I am unmoved by your reasoning, Tyro.
You don’t think Wiccans are hurting us; I think they are dangerous enablers for fundamentalists. It isn’t as though I haven’t already addressed this; I pointed at certain posts in the previous thread for that reason. Feel free to engage with what I said.
Sorry, I don’t follow you. No True Scotsman? But where?
If you don’t say anything on the topic, you won’t be lumped in with fundies, because nobody will know what you believe.
Well, I guess I don’t see what’s so terrible about that. You’re already accustomed to doing it when you discuss tax proposals and your preferred candidate for dogcatcher.
Yikes. I don’t know what to tell you then, Tapetum. Either you can present evidence for the existence of your epiphenomenal noosphere entity, or you are the sort of person who believes in fanciful ideas for which you have insufficient evidence. The latter would reflect somewhat poorly upon your rationality. I can see why you wouldn’t like that result, but can you say that it ought to be different?
Almost nothing can be proven. All we can do is look for evidence, not proof. Conscious beings interact with the world in particular ways that non-conscious objects do not. One can look for those signs and ask whether there is a pattern of behavior that appears consistent with consciousness. For most people, that’s sufficient evidence that other humans and nonhuman animals have minds.
Eloquently said, Betty.
See, this is why atheists irritate me. You guys are just as enamored of your One Truth, which is that there is no god, deity or transcendant being and there is no experience which is non-materialistic, as theists are. You’re just as condescending to believers as believers are to you; it’s just your numbers are so small in the population that you can’t really be the total assholes you’d be if you were, say, 95% of the electorate.
I’m an agnostic. I don’t know if there is a spiritual, non-materialistic existence or not. By definition, our current scientific abilities could not examine such a state; therefore it is not possible to know it doesn’t exist, *or* that it does. So I am fine with people who say “I don’t believe in God”, because there’s no evidence of God. And I am fine with people who say “I do believe in God”, because there’s no scientific evidence of no God. But what chaps my hide is when either camp says “I’m right and you’re wrong”, because *there is no way to know.*
Now, there’s ample evidence that Christianity, as a belief system, is nonsensical. In fact I have a rather strong interest in “intelligent design” from a completely different perspective than the fundies have; I believe that if you postulate that life was created by an intelligent source, and then you actually study life to try to understand the properties of the creator, you cannot possibly come up with an omnipotent, omniscient, superintelligent God who profoundly cares about what human beings do with their genitals. If we were created by a designer, that designer was kind of an idiot, otherwise where did our bad backs come from and why do we still have spleens? So I think you can prove that *Christianity* isn’t true. (And all the monotheistic religions, by the same token.)
But you can’t prove that there is no transcendant being, you can’t prove that we weren’t created by something with a mind (you can prove that this would be irrelevant if true, and that it’s not likely, but not that it didn’t happen), you can’t prove the nonexistence of the soul… and yes, in laboratories you can experimentally replicate “spiritual” experience with proper brain stimulation. On the other hand you can also experimentally replicate “blue”. Blue is a representation of reality that we can perceive; perhaps our brain wiring for spirituality detects something that’s really there, perhaps it is wholly an artifact of the way we are made. We cannot *know.*
Condescending and sneering attitudes that only atheists are smart enough and brave enough to confront the idea that there is no God are no more appropriate than condescending and sneering attitudes that only fundamentalist Christians will go to heaven. That is the problem with challenging the beliefs of the “spiritual”, not that it shouldn’t be done but that I don’t think most of you can do it without sounding like assholes. I don’t have any more respect for proselytizing atheists than I do for proselytizing theists. If you cannot back off and respect non-provable beliefs that are doing no one any harm, why should anyone respect your non-provable beliefs?
(And the notion that a belief in an afterlife or in a transcendant being inherently degrades human life is just a belief itself. I personally believe that *if* there were a transcendant being that created life, life itself would still have value, just as I have value even though I was demonstrably created by my mother and father. I exist, therefore my life has meaning, and I do not need to reference the perspective of a transcendant being to assign my life value. Which makes the existence or nonexistence of such a being profoundly irrelevant to me, as I’d live my life the same either way. And I’m not going to respect other people trying to tell me I must live my life a certain way because their concept of a transcendant being said so, but that doesn’t mean I must insist that there *is* no transcendant being… only that if it exists, its properties are almost certainly not the properties the monotheists argue that it has.)
So go ahead and be an atheist. There is no scientific evidence that God exists, so you’ve got excellent reason to be an atheist. But if someone has experienced something that makes them believe that yes, there is a non-material reality, acting like they are an idiot and talking down to them is not a good idea. Science *cannot* talk about non-material reality any more than science can really speak to experiences like love — we can describe what in the brain causes it to occur, but we cannot actually *describe* love or quantify it or analyze it scientifically. This isn’t a flaw in science; you can’t use your eyeballs to analyze a smell, either. And if you’ve never loved anyone, no one can describe to you what it feels like. So don’t assume that because people with spiritual experiences cannot describe them to those who have not had them, that they didn’t happen or that the person is stupid for believing in them.
(Note: I personally have never had an experience science couldn’t explain… I just don’t think that’s a good reason to denigrate people who have had experiences I haven’t.)
That was the first truly stupid thing said in this thread so far. I stopped reading after this point; I doubt you can say anything else interesting if you can spit that bullshit past your teeth.
I and most atheists are agnostic atheists. Bullshit slanders about Truth with a capital T don’t apply to me. And I’m sure as hell not interested in talking to someone who so blatantly misrepresents me as you have done.
Alara- thank you! I’m a longtime lurker who was about to delurk because I was so bothered by the condescension in this thread, but you said it better than I could have.
To sort of get back to the main topic, I grew up in a fundamentalist household and have attended conservative churches for four decades, and it is my experience that women are just as anti-feminist as men.
People who believe in what they think as the literal truth of the Bible have conservative views, no matter their gender. Many of these women think that what would seem to us to be male domination is good for them.
I still attend a fairly conservative church, even though I am on the left end of the spectrum of politics and pretty much an agnostic in religious views. Why? Because otherwise my wife would not be happy (and for social resaons). She is an evangelical Christian who is very conservative on social issues (although she hates politics).
Alara -
“You guys are just as enamored of your One Truth, which is that there is no god, deity or transcendant being and there is no experience which is non-materialistic, as theists are.”
Incorrect. We are saying, and have said for some time, that there is no evidence these things exist. And while, yes, absence of evidence does not equal evidence of absence, it sure as hell is no reason to believe in their existence.
Basically, I can tell you that without any equipment but my own two arms I can fly like the birdies. You can’t disprove this. So, is it more reasonable to believe that I can or that I can’t?
Flatly stating that there’s no evidence therefore you don’t believe I can fly is not even close to what you’re accusing us of.
The constant penchant for misrepresentations of the debate are what annoy me most about soft agnostics. I’m mystified that someone congradulated you on this misrepresentation.
I had a conversation with my father once where I finally clarified his spiritual (or not) beliefs - he said that he did not define himself as “atheist” because that still positioned you in comparison to god - a-theist. He just wanted to take himself out of spectrum of god-relating altogether.
It was as good an explanation as I have ever been able to come up with as to why I don’t identify as atheist whilst also certainly not believing in god.
And I will never have answers to such questions as Chet asked Kali that would satisfy the asker. Personally, I’m convinced that the mindset that makes one an atheist disinclines the atheist to be satisfied with any self-description someone like myself or Kali or nihilix could give.
Well, look, before you start leaping to conclusions about what I would or wouldn’t accept because of my “mindset”, why don’t you give it the ol’ college try?
Because, I mean, the fact that all you post-atheist believers always tell me not to even bother asking what convinced you, because it “wouldn’t satisfy” us, is starting to look like a bit of a dodge. Stop making guesses about what evidence you think I’d dismiss out of hand and actually present it. Maybe you’ll be surprised by what I’m willing to accept. And even if you’re not the worst that happens is that you waste 5 minutes talking about yourself.
I just don’t get it. Why is it impossible to find a post-atheist believer who will actually explain what led them to abandon atheism? I mean, you’re a Wiccan now? Does that mean that you were convinced when you saw someone cast a spell, and then were able to do it yourself?
Or what?
I’m not here to “defend my woo.” I don’t need to defend it, anymore than I would expect anyone here to defend their atheism.
Another sentiment that I just can’t understand. As an atheist, I expect to be asked to defend my atheism. I mean, it’s a position I take not only about my own personal beliefs, but about the reality of the universe. To be atheist, just like to be theist or Wiccan or what have you, is to make an objective claim about the universe. I make the claim, implicitly, that the universe contains no gods. You make the claim, implicitly, that a unifying life-force is manifest in the natural world. (I’m cribbing from Wikipedia here.)
Why shouldn’t we have to defend those claims if we expect them to be taken seriously? I’m prepared to defend mine. I don’t understand why you think it’s illegitimate to be asked to defend yours.
Can you explain?
I did, in this. “OK, what is the logical reason why I am prioritising the reality of my physical experiences over the reality of my non physical experiences? What, exactly is making me assume that spiritual experience is a subset of physical experience, rather than vice versa?”
But that doesn’t even begin to answer the question, Kali. It’s not even the start of the answer. Your supposed answer simply assumes what you were trying to prove - that it’s even at all possible for you to have non-physical experiences.
So, no, you haven’t answered my question. Is it because you don’t understand it? What evidence led you to believe that you were having non-physical experiences, and how could you possibly be having them, being a physical being with physical senses?
By definition, our current scientific abilities could not examine such a state; therefore it is not possible to know it doesn’t exist, *or* that it does.
And you think that in the lack of evidence for a certain thing is found support for both propositions?
I don’t. When someone comes up to me asserting the existence of Invisible Unicorns, and another person asserts their nonexistence, the fact that there’s no evidence of such unicorns isn’t equal support for both sides; it’s, in fact, good support for the position of the second guy.
Absence of evidence is evidence of absence. That’s how we know when to buy more beer - the absence of any evidence of beer in our refrigerators is evidence that beer is absent from our refrigerators.
Grammar and Chet - I don’t feel impelled to defend my beliefs on the make-up of the universe, nor like I even particularly want to for a couple of reasons.
1) I don’t care if you think my views are correct, or loopy, or anything else in the world. Doesn’t matter to me in the least - except that I would appreciate not being treated like I’m suspect because I’ve reacted to things I’m not sure about with a solid “I don’t know, but I suppose it might be this, and that would be kind of cool.” Which is about as strong a belief system as I’ve got. I’ll freely admit theism isn’t rational, per se.
2) People aren’t rational (yes, even you). People (as Amanda was noting fairly aptly) are rationalizing animals, not rational ones. Logic is a construct piled on top of millions of years of animal brain. We can do our best, but actually expecting anybody to be rational about everything they believe about the universe (which, in your calls to complete rationality, you are) is, in and of itself, fairly irrational. I’ll freely admit theism isn’t rational, per se. I just fail to see how that makes it any different from any other human construct that isn’t tirelessly put together over centuries with safeguards and multiple redundancies to increase the logic to it’s highest possible point (which would be science, mathematics, and an a weird way, Catholic theology, provided you ignore all the points at which it’s attempting to predict actual reality.)
3) If anybody really wants me to ennumerate my particular epiphanal experiences, I have no objection to doing so. What I don’t want, and will react negatively to, is someone asking for said experiences and then picking them apart in order to prove to me that really, I should be an atheist after all. They are mine. I don’t expect them to convince anybody else. I would actually be worried for anybody they did convince (Why should they privilege my experiences and interpretations over theirs?). I’m well aware of the various possible neurological explanations - probably better than most of you, having worked in a neuropharmacology lab for several years.
In all honesty, I don’t know what I believe, except that my gut believes in something. So being asked to defend my beliefs against all comers is a seriously strange request from my point-of-view. Really? What beliefs? To use the teacup in orbit analogy, I’m being asked to defend my belief that there’s a teacup, or a mug, or something possibly cup-shaped - or not - in orbit between Mars and the Earth, or maybe out by Jupiter, or Alpha Centauri, or a few galaxies over… There’s nothing defined enough to defend.
Which is why I seem to end up defined as an atheist by the religious and a theist by the atheists I guess.
I don’t feel impelled to defend my beliefs on the make-up of the universe, nor like I even particularly want to for a couple of reasons.
Because you can’t, obviously. You hold unsupportable views about the make-up of the universe.
Which is fine, but you seem to want it both ways - you want the freedom to hold an unreasonable position without anyone opening their mouths and telling you how unreasonable you find it. Which is exactly what believers have always demanded from atheists - silence.
I don’t care if you think my views are correct, or loopy, or anything else in the world.
But it actually seems like you do care, quite a bit, like when you said:
I read that as your request to be taken seriously, and not to be assumed to be unreasonable, which would indicate to me that you actually do care, at least somewhat, which makes it so incomprehensible that you won’t actually shoulder the burden that comes with being reasonable, which is to defend your positions when they appear to be contradicted by even the most casual inspection.
People aren’t rational (yes, even you).
Not everybody’s like you, Tapetum. Some of us have absolutely no problem committing ourselves to rational inquiry into the natural world, inquiry that proceeds from defensible evidence and rigorous methodology - and performed by ourselves, not just taken as Gospel from an elite society of scientist-priests (which, if you’re following the standard anti-atheist playbook, is your next accusation.)
I don’t know if “people” are rational or not. But I do know that even regular people can tell the difference between what is a reasonable way to find out what actually exists, and what is made-up make-believe. Except some people, like you, throw that all out the window when the word “God” is breathed, because the belief is so precious to them that it must be immune from all challenge.
They are mine. I don’t expect them to convince anybody else.
Then why allow them to convince yourself? Why embrace reasoning you know to be faulty?
Tapetum, do you think that I as an atheist don’t have experiences that I could use to convince myself of the existence of God? Whispered voices in the night? Amazingly helpful coincidences? Protection from harm? Etc? Of course I do. But since they wouldn’t convince a reasonable person, why would I ever allow them to convince myself? Why would I choose to be less rigorous than a reasonable person, unless it was because I wanted to believe something regardless of whether or not it was correct?
In all honesty, I don’t know what I believe, except that my gut believes in something.
My gut believes that the Earth is flat and gets the wrong answer to the Monte Carlo problem all the time. My gut believes that white male people are better and smarter than everybody else, especially women.
The problem with guts is that they have shit for brains. If people are irrational, it’s because they listen to their guts instead of to what their senses are telling them.
Okay, apparently I’m not making myself very clear. So let’s try again.
First, no, people, all people, are not rational. I can prove it to you with more neuroscience than you can shake a stick at. It doesn’t mean that rationality is useless. It doesn’t mean that logic is meaningless. It just means that everyone on the planet is inherently irrational in at least some areas. That’s what the science says. Lots and lots of people stick that irrationality into the packet called God, other people don’t. If you are perfectly rational about your God-thinking, good for you. If you think you’re rational, period, you’re fooling yourself.
That said, I don’t find agnosticism to be particularly irrational as a stance. Not even active involved agnosticism with theistic leanings. If you can prove to me there’s no there there, it won’t exactly shake my foundations. But good luck to you anyway.
I don’t expect my experiences to convince you because you weren’t in my head. Other people’s epiphanies are not particularly convincing evidence. Nor do I think you haven’t had any. Gorgeous sunsets and feelings of oneness with the universe were all well and good, but decidedly insufficient. Coincidences are largely either meaningless or explainable. A gathering of somewhat more concrete stuff - like having calm imposed upon me from what distinctly felt like outside, in the middle of a medical crisis, a calm so complete that for twelve hours my blood pressure and heart rate never budged from normal despite freak-out conditions - gradually added up to discovering that my gut didn’t agree with my head any more.
Guts frequently are wrong, it’s why I continue to investigate. On the other hand, there is plenty of empirical evidence to support a globular Earth - some of which I can find just by sticking my head out the window and looking at the horizon. And when the Monty Hall dilemma didn’t make sense (Monte Carlo approximations didn’t bother me), I kept poking at it until I found an explanation that both my gut and my head could deal with (which has the added advantage that I can explain it to other people very well). What there is with “God” is a whole bunch of stuff which is interpretable sixty different ways, most of which also has available materialistic explanations - some of which aren’t very strong, some of which are very strong. Not exactly something to make absolute declarations off of.
That’s where I currently stand with “God”. My head says one thing (agnosticism), my gut another (theism). If my head were atheistic, that would be an active conflict, but that’s part of the beauty of agnosticism. And I intend to keep poking at it until my head and my gut can find something they can both wrap themselves around - or until I die. I’m betting on death first, personally.
As to the don’t care/do care thing. I don’t care if you’re persuaded by my views or not. I don’t care if you think my views on this topic are entirely irrational or not. I do care if holding this one set of views means you think I’m entirely irrational. All people are irrational somewhere (as said above, if you want the reading list, say so and I’ll provide one). Most people are capable of containing it to a few common areas.
(Addendum: I’d have a hard time accusing science of being a religion with a straight face. Some people treat it like one, but they’re kind of missing the whole point of science.)
It just means that everyone on the planet is inherently irrational in at least some areas.
I’m sorry but I just don’t see the relevance. People get cancer, too; it doesn’t mean that we embrace cancer. We fight it. We cut it out. We recognize that cancer, as common as it is, is bad and we take steps to suppress it to the extent that we can.
So too with irrationality. There’s nothing good about it. That it dogs our every step is not a recommendation in its favor; it’s a fact of life that makes it all the more important to make sure we don’t go around believing things for no good reason.
I don’t expect my experiences to convince you because you weren’t in my head. Other people’s epiphanies are not particularly convincing evidence.
Why do you think that is, Tapetum? Could it be because we’re irrational, and we privilege personal interpretation of personal experience a lot more than we should?
I still don’t understand your position, because it doesn’t make any sense at all. “I know it’s irrational,” you seem to be saying, “but please stop reminding me of that. It hurts my feelings.”
If you don’t want your feelings hurt, why not simply embrace the rational position you’re already aware of? From what basis can you hope to cling to irrationality at the same time that you’re telling all us atheist killjoys to please stop reminding you that you hold irrational beliefs?
Your gut? The same gut that you recognize gets it wrong? I still don’t get it.
A gathering of somewhat more concrete stuff - like having calm imposed upon me from what distinctly felt like outside
From outside?
Or from a part of yourself that you hadn’t discovered, yet? How could you possibly know the difference? And why would you short-shrift your own ability to find calm in crisis?
And I intend to keep poking at it until my head and my gut can find something they can both wrap themselves around - or until I die.
It’s your version of “poking” that a lot of us object to. Your means of “poking” is to just make stuff up and believe it. You don’t seem to think that’s particularly rational, yet you’re doing it anyway, to appease your gut?
Most people are capable of containing it to a few common areas.
Most people think that it’s a good idea to restrict irrationality to as few areas as possible. I recognize that it’s an effort, a lifelong effort, and that perfect success is probably not possible.
But why embrace the failure? Why simply give some kinds of irrationality a pass? That’s the part of your position that I continue to fail to understand. Are you under the impression, or something, that you can’t live with your guts disagreeing with you? You should try it sometime; it’s amazing how quickly the gut will fall in line.
Chet - did you miss the part where I said I don’t find agnosticism to be an irrational stance?
Nor did poking refer to just making stuff up and believing it. It means actively investigating what other people believe and if it fits with what I know to be true, contradicts it, or doesn’t speak to it at all. The epiphenomenon explanation above is the “current best hypothesis”. You seem to be ascribing a level of certainty to my belief that simply isn’t there.
As to the gut - guts are frequently wrong. However, my gut has also been right, sometimes against all consciously realized evidence. Generally if my emotions persist in reacting a given way, firmly against my conscious mind’s opinions (which in this case it’s not, as my conscious mind doesn’t have a firm opinion), it’s because there’s something going on that my conscious mind hasn’t noticed yet. So I keep poking until whatever it is comes to light. Sometimes that revealed evidence doesn’t alter my conscious opinion - in which case my gut generally goes along once its concerns have been addressed. Other times there really have been things going on, other information that I had not noticed, which meant that my conscious mind had made its decision on insufficient information, and made it wrongly. On occassion, very wrongly indeed. So, given time, I would rather pay attention and try to ferret out what the hold-up is - and really the only hurry to make up my mind comes from other peoples’ discomfort, since any God worth worshipping wouldn’t fry people for using the brains they were given, and a lack-of-God would obviously not care at all.
Our emotions may be irrational, but they’re not failures. They’re shortcuts to decision making and prioritizers (check the studies on people with emotion-impairing brain damage). Giving them free rein without engaging rationality is a bad idea, but so is ignoring them altogether.
If you want to challenge me on having firm opinions, then I’ll give you the only absolute I have. The vengeful, punish-the-sinners and fry all non-believers hell God of the fundies? Doesn’t exist. And if he did, he wouldn’t be worthy of worship. Other than that, sir. I only have preferences.
May I also say that I get very tired of people either a) thinking I’ve made up my mind already (and always, for some reason in the direction they dissapprove of), or b) telling me I’ve got to decide now, dammit!
Chet - did you miss the part where I said I don’t find agnosticism to be an irrational stance?
Tapetum, I don’t need you to tell me that my stance of agnostic atheism is reasonable; I already know that it is. The issue isn’t whether or not agnostic atheism is the reasonable position, because we’ve both agreed that it is.
The issue is why you think a deliberate choice to embrace the unreasonable alternative is not only the choice you want to make, but that making that choice shouldn’t reflect poorly on your capacity to be reasonable; that, indeed, your choice to be unreasonable should be set beyond all challenge.
I still don’t get it.
You seem to be ascribing a level of certainty to my belief that simply isn’t there.
You certainly before felt enough of a degree of certainty to posit, absent any evidence, the existence of some kind of human meta-mind endowed with powers beyond hope of physical explanation. So it’s a little unsupportable of you to retreat into a coward’s agnosticism after you’ve already laid your theism out on the table.
Giving them free rein without engaging rationality is a bad idea, but so is ignoring them altogether.
Why? If they’re shortcuts to decision-making then sure, we should pay attention when the decision has to be made in a short period of time.
But, as you say, there’s all the time in the world, here. Why pay needless attention to the shortcut - that, more often than not, gets it wrong - when it’s obvious to both of us that the long way around is going to be more reliable?
telling me I’ve got to decide now, dammit!
You don’t have to decide now, Tapetum, or at any time. But when you say something like
it sounds like I’m talking to someone who already made up their mind by leaping to a conclusion they can’t possibly support with evidence.
Chet–in response to your last sentence, I think the trouble is that you’re overestimating the force behind Tapetum’s “belief.” S/he should feel free to correct me if I’m wrong, but I read that as saying that she *hasn’t* “made up her mind,” but rather than she thinks that this epiphenomenal god is an intriguing and plausible speculation.
Is there evidence for it? Of course not, but it’s damn stupid to say we shouldn’t play around with ideas that we don’t have evidence for. We shouldn’t 100% accept ideas that we don’t have evidence for. But there’s a whole lot of middle ground between “I believe it” and “I think it’s ridiculous and not worth considering.” The human mind is not a computer, in that our thoughts are not written in binary.
Oy. It’s not a retreat into agnosticism. I am an agnostic theist. My preference is for their to be a god. My working hypothesis is the epiphenomenal God posited in the bit you quoted. My knowledge is diddly/squat, as is everyone else’s, whether they think so or not.
Part of the problem appears to be in our respective definitions of “belief”. Mine is what I would term a scientist’s definition - where one might say “I believe this is what’s going on.” or “I believe this would explain what I’m seeing.”, and then goes about trying to test the notion. You seem to be using it in the more strictly religious definition (ironically enough), wherein a belief is something one knows to be true. When I mean that, I say ‘know’ not ‘believe’.
Ah - missed part of your comment in responding the first time, sorry.
Feelings are partially a short-cut, yes, but that’s not all they are. Feelings, particularly strong feelings that are counter what my conscious mind is thinking, tend to be huge clues to missing information. In this case, my conscious mind sees insufficient evidence for either yes or no, while my feelings fall hard to yes. From this, I’m drawing two things. 1) There’s something I’m not seeing yet, so I’d better look for it. 2) Since it’s not antithetical to my conscious mind, I’ll go with the gut for the working hypothesis in the meanwhile (I.e. there’s something), while I’m looking.
And no (since I’m picturing this as your next assumption, rightly or wrongly), theism is not defaulting to how I was reared. My Dad’s an atheistic agnostic, while Mom is an uninterested agnostic. The first time I set foot in a church was at age 12 for a wedding.
The frustrating thing here, Chet, is that on the spectrum of belief/non-belief, I’m probably a good deal closer to you than to you’re average born-again Christian.
S/he should feel free to correct me if I’m wrong, but I read that as saying that she *hasn’t* “made up her mind,” but rather than she thinks that this epiphenomenal god is an intriguing and plausible speculation.
Based on what? No good evidence, as far as any of us are aware.
Coming to conclusions based on no good evidence is what we’re talking about, here. It’s irrelevant how strongly the conclusions are held; most Christians don’t cleave to their own beliefs especially strongly, either. Tapetum has embraced the idea of coming to conclusions in this matter on the basis of no good evidence, and I’m simply puzzled as to why. It doesn’t make any sense.
My working hypothesis is the epiphenomenal God posited in the bit you quoted.
Even a hypothesis needs evidence behind it, Tapetum. You don’t have any. You’re simply jumping to the conclusion that you recognize is irrational, and for the life of me I can’t understand why you would want to do that.
And you won’t explain, it seems like. How can I hope to understand it if you won’t explain?
And no (since I’m picturing this as your next assumption, rightly or wrongly), theism is not defaulting to how I was reared. My Dad’s an atheistic agnostic, while Mom is an uninterested agnostic.
Irrelevant. You grew up in the West, I assume, and so monotheistic belief is your default in the same way that it’s mine. If you had grown up in India, you’d have a gut feeling that there was something to Hindu belief, and it might be Vishnu you were describing as an epiphenomenon of consciousnesses, or whatever.
The frustrating thing here, Chet, is that on the spectrum of belief/non-belief, I’m probably a good deal closer to you than to you’re average born-again Christian.
Also not particularly relevant. There’s still this one area where you think it’s completely acceptable and not at all unreasonable to jump to a conclusion on the basis of absolutely no good evidence for doing so.
You seem to think that’s such a good idea that you’re incensed at the idea that some might disagree. It’s the nature of that incomprehensible thought process I’m trying to get to the bottom of, and you’re right, it’s been frustrating because you won’t answer even that simple question.
Last I checked, the relevent bit for a hypothesis was merely some piece of information which is either not covered, or not covered perfectly by existing hypotheses. In this case, personal experience provides experiences, that while the strict atheist hypothesis could be stretched to cover, it is a stretch.
To return to your commentary on the calm-during-a-medical-crisis. To wit:
It might be a part of myself I haven’t discovered yet. But I’ve had crises before (including medical ones), and I’m actually pretty darned good at acting calm. This felt very different. Not only that, but it was provably, medically different. I was hooked up to montors for most of a day, and my blood-pressure and heartrate never budged from the normal range. My normal calm in a crisis would be surface - I would be acting calm and making rational decisions, but my blood pressure normally goes up some from even a minor test when I’m not particularly stressed. It felt like it came from outside; it felt different, in much the same way talking to your friend feels different from talking to yourself. My initial reaction was that a nurse must have slipped something into my IV that I wasn’t aware of (though if it was a drug, it was a hell of a drug), but I didn’t think anybody had given me anything at that point, and was able to confirm that later with my husband, my mother and my chart. I’m familiar with endorphin highs, and it didn’t feel like that either.
In short, it could be some physical reaction to extreme circumstances that I’ve never encountered before, but it doesn’t match up with any that I’m aware of. So I’m postulating in either case - I either speculate on the basis of fairly little evidence, since fairly little evidence is all I have (more than just this incident, but still not tremendous amounts), or I refuse to look at the incident at all. I can speculate within the strictly atheistic world (which you would have me do), or speculate more freely. Since I’m not antithetical to the notion of God/s, spiritual beings - whatever the hell you want to refer to them as, why would I artificially constrict myself?
In short, no. A working hypothesis does not need evidence behind it. What it needs is to plausibly cover what is already known, or at least leave room for it. Evidence is what you then go out and acquire by testing the hypothesis. I’m not offended if people don’t think my hypothesis is correct any more than my boss was offended if people didn’t believe her hypothesis about the role of NMDA receptors in addiction. It’s something I find plausible and intriguing and am actively working to see if further exploration and experience blows it out of the water, or modifies it, or supports it, or doesn’t speak to it at all.
Most hypotheses don’t have much evidence behind them when they were first thought up. Evidence is what you go out and get while looking for ways to poke holes in the explanation. Hypotheses only become firm after they survive a lot of poking. The more poking they survive, the firmer they become, it’s how the system works.
Glah. Long response in moderation (I think). Shorter version. Evidence isn’t what you have when you form a hypothesis, it’s what you get when you test it. You have to have it first.
Plus - I’m incensed that someone might disagree with me? Where? I’m a little frustrated that you seem to think that though processes that don’t come to the same conclusions vis-a-vis the supernatural (Gah. If I say God, it’s assumed I mean something like THE ONE TRUE GOD, if I use supernatural it sounds like I believe in ghosts and aliens), are automatically irrational in nature. That’s about it. I don’t really do incensed.
Evidence isn’t what you have when you form a hypothesis
Er, no, Tapetum; several years of experience in the sciences begs to differ. “Hypothesis” isn’t a synonym for “wild-ass guess”, it’s the first step in forming a theory to explain an observation.
Which means that you have to already have observations to explain. That’s evidence. Hypotheses are supported by at least some evidence, otherwise there’s no reason to make them.
Plus - I’m incensed that someone might disagree with me? Where?
Where? Everywhere. Every post drips with barely concealed outrage that any might consider your thought process suspect. Remember when you said:
You deliberately describe doing something unreasonable - making up “what could be in the box” on the basis of no evidence that anything’s in it - and then are incensed that any would dare find you unreasonable for doing so.
I can’t comprehend the double-think you’re engaged in, I really can’t.
I’m a little frustrated that you seem to think that thought processes that don’t come to the same conclusions vis-a-vis the supernatural … are automatically irrational in nature.
Thought processes that come to conclusions on the basis of no good evidence are automatically irrational in nature, yes. Why wouldn’t they be? Why does it piss you off so bad to be informed of this?
Gah. If I say God, it’s assumed I mean something like THE ONE TRUE GOD, if I use supernatural it sounds like I believe in ghosts and aliens
Yes. And when you say “oranges” it’s assumed you’re talking about round citrus fruit.
Words mean things. You must be aware of that. If you don’t mean “God” when you say “God”, if instead you mean “community” or “love” or “an epiphenomenon of consciousnesses”, you really have no one to blame but yourself when you’re misunderstood. And if you mean these things, which are not god at all but tarted-up atheism, but want to say “god” anyway, it’s not because you’re a theist who believes in God, it’s because you’re an atheist too ashamed to admit it.
Or perhaps because the vocabulary to explain what I’m talking about either isn’t precise, or doesn’t exist.
What one can talk about is strongly circumscribed by the language one has to use to talk about it.
Headed out the door, while post more later. I’m also hoping the long response (which goes into more detail about what evidence I’m working from) comes out of moderation in the meanwhile.
Will post more later, not while. Sorry.
Or perhaps because the vocabulary to explain what I’m talking about either isn’t precise, or doesn’t exist.
But that’s just the old theistic dodge. If there was really something to what you were talking about, it would be no problem to coin the vocabulary as necessary. If language can express the quantum nature of the universe it can surely be used to express this.
But that’s not the game you want to play, is it? You want to play the game where you fault atheists for being close-minded to God; and then retreat from the consequences of your assertions and say “Oh, your mistake, when I said ‘God’ I didn’t mean that God.” It’s nonsense.
Surely the imprecision of language doesn’t necessitate saying “apple” when we mean “orange.” If you can’t find the language to express your ideas its because you don’t want them expressed; you want them concealed from the harsh light of skepticism.
All right. I’ll see what I can say as plainly as possible, and this is the last I’m going to post on this thread. It’s taking up way more time than it’s worth.
a) I don’t think atheists at large are close-minded. I don’t even think you, Chet, are necessarily close-minded. I don’t think that you are hearing what I’m trying to say, because you keep hearing other things that other people have said and interpreting what I’m saying in that light. Which is extraordinarily hard for most people not to do.
b) I don’t have external evidence for the existence of pretty much anything, like or unlike God. The internal evidence I have really only means anything to me. I haven’t discarded the physiological explanations, though they have to be stretched and stretched hard to cover what I experienced. In light of this lack of external evidence, I have no problem with other people not accepting said evidence, nor in fact should they.
c) I am not ignorant of neurology, psychology, physiology or related issues. I have a degree in cognitive science. I’ve worked in a neuropharmacology lab. I know how whacked out the brain can get in interpreting the world. Short of a nurse slipping me some medication without putting on the chart, and without three people in the room noticing, none of the possibilities quite fit what happened. (I’m sticking with one incident here, since it’s what’s already been discussed at least a little.) Note the quite. I’m not discarding the straight-up materialistic explanation. However, I don’t have any evidence for a neurological phenomenon, (Such as a temporal lobe seizure, for example. I haven’t had any such seizures before or since, nor any of the classical symptoms of one). so I would need such evidence, or I would need an alternative explanation. Having eliminated the physical explanations, not to the nth degree, but enough to say all the ones I’m aware of are unlikely, that leaves other possibilities.
c) Since I don’t have my very own religious following and don’t get to define my own vocabulary, I really don’t have much choice but to use existing philisophical or theological language to express what I’m trying to say. This can get very roundabout. Sorry if that offends you, but it is what it is. If it makes you feel better, I can point you to a 40 page, thickly written, treatise on the meaning of the word ‘the’. The concepts expressed were not, at heart, terribly difficult, but the language to express the thoughts really wasn’t available, so the poor author was stuck going round and round and round the concepts trying to show what he meant. I’m told he had an even worse time in his native German.
So I usually use ‘God’, which isn’t quite right. Or ‘higher power’, which makes me cringe as a concept. Or ‘the supernatural’, which really isn’t right, since pretty much every speculation I make would be pretty darned natural - even the epiphenomenon of concious thought would be a natural phenomenon. If I came into a thread and started talking about Fred and Fredness, I would be rightly called out and asked to define Fred, which would pretty much put me right back where we started.
d) I am an agnostic. First, foremost, and always. I was an agnostic when I was six, I’m an agnostic at thirty-eight. Theism is a preference. I would like the universe better with Fred there. I have some thoughts on what a worthwhile Fred would look like, and which values of Fred would fit with reality as I have experienced it. If a particular conception of Fred proves to conflict with reality in a concrete way, I discard it. Hypotheses are pretty iridescent bubbles while facts are big pointy rocks, you know which one wins when they meet.
If the above makes you toss me out as irredeemably irrational, so be it.
Tapetum, if you are talking about an “emergent epiphenomenal noosphere entity”, probably the worst word you could possibly use to identify it is “God”. It absolutely guarantees you are going to be misunderstood. You might as well just say “emergent epiphenomenal noosphere entity”; you’ll still be asked to explain the terms, but you won’t be filling the listener’s head with misconceptions and baggage-laden prejudices from the start. Just some advice…
(Are you sure you mean “epiphenomenal”? Wouldn’t that mean it cannot affect anything else?)
Praise be to Eene, the compassionate, the merciful.