How can we come to common understandings about the nature of existence?

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Originally posted: http://bendench.blogspot.com/2009/05/some-words-on-method.html

Dialogue is very important. The purpose of a debate is to win—but the purpose of a dialogue is to increase understanding. It's non-adversarial in nature. The other person is your friend. You want to learn from them, and teach them, and come to a common understanding. There are no losers.

 

Consider the following, based on an email I sent a friend of mine in response to his story about how he converted to Christianity:

[begin]

I would like to say, first of all, that I both respect you and regard your experience as legitimate. From my point of view, the question is not whether or not spiritual experiences are real, but rather how to go about interpreting those experiences.

[My friend relates being raised in what he describes as a faith-neutral home, with no discussion of spirituality either positive or negative.]

You’ve heard of a power vacuum: if a region looses its leadership, it can create an unstable situation in which any group can come and step in. Well, I think there is also such a thing as a spiritual vacuum. When people grow up without any spiritual experiences, they look for anything to fill that void. In our society, I think there is a great deal of spiritual illiteracy. Spiritual experiences are marginalized. There is a type of underground, but there is no oversight. People are taught to separate critical thinking and spiritual experiences as a matter of principle. And this is detrimental to a genuine understanding of how the universe works.

[My friend relates how he use to believe the Bible was false and pointless, but that he had a moving experience attending church with a friend of his. He was impressed by the music and the message presented there, and was moved by their discussion of the Bible's cohesiveness despite being written by many authors over many centuries.]

Often times fundamentalist apologists make claims that seem convincing on the surface but which, upon further study, fall apart. Tobin does a good job presenting the general mainstream scholarly responses to popular apologetic claims in an article specifically targeting these:

http://www.geocities.com/paulntobin/apologetics.html

You mention, for example, the uniformity of the Bible. This is what Tobin has to say about the issue:

“Q1. Doesn't the fact the Bible shows such an impressive uniformity, although the period of composition spans many centuries, point to the idea that it had a single (divine) author?

“The idea of 'uniformity' is very vague. On the one hand, this claim is trivially true. One would expect some kind of uniformity in the Bible just on the basis of three contingent facts:

“1. The Old Testament is a collection of books from one specific people in the middle east. Thus we would expect cultural continuity (such as the same language [Hebrew or its derivative Aramaic], the same adherence to holy books, i.e. The Torah etc) to be contained within the books since most cultures persist for some time through history.

“2. Similarly the New Testament is a collection of books taken from a group (although not homogeneous as we have seen above) of people who lived in the first and second centuries CE who believed that Jesus's coming was a fulfillment of the Old Testament prophecies. Finding some 'continuity' in its message with the Old Testament is therefore not surprising.

“3. Finally, and this must not be forgotten, the books of the Bible were collected at (more or less) singular moments in history. The Old Testament for instance was collected by a Rabbinic 'council' during the years following the Jewish revolt in 70 CE. Books that did not correspond to the theological views of the rabbis were explicitly excluded from the canon of the Old Testament. [We give a more detailed description of this process elsewhere in this website.] Thus much of this 'uniformity' is not something which occurs naturally but arose out of an active selection process by Jewish Rabbis within a given period in history. Similarly many books were excluded from the New Testament because they did not conform to the views of the Church Fathers that eventually won control over nascent Christianity. [We give a more detailed description of this process elsewhere in this website.]

“On the other hand, this claim is wrong. When we look at the details, we do not find a uniformity of theologies within the covers of the Bible. There are actually many differing (in some cases diametrically opposite) theologies which can be found in the Bible. In the Old Testament, for instance we find diametrically opposite views on life in Proverbs and in Ecclesiastes. Similarly in the New Testament we find completely opposing views on the value of good works between the epistles of James and Paul.

“Thus the claim that the Bible is an 'impressive uniformity' is in one sense trivial and in another sense wrong.”

http://www.geocities.com/paulntobin/apologetics.html#q1

[My friend relates going to the church in question for a period of months to test it out. The biblical account of the ministry of Jesus and the history of the Jewish people were explained to him. He decided to pray to God for forgiveness, because he had, in his own description, done a good deal of sinning up to that point.]

It sounds like you felt very guilty about something—maybe something particular, or maybe just a feeling of guilt in general. But this seems more like a psychological matter than a theological one—though it is a psychological matter that Christian groups exploit in order to gain influence.

Listen:

“Before we present the further consequences of this condition, we want to avow that man has arrived at this condition not through his ‘guilt’ and ‘sin,’ but rather through a series of errors of reason, that if his nature seemed dark and hateful to him to that degree, it was the fault of the mirror, and that that mirror was his creation, the very imperfect creation of human imagination and powers of judgment.”

http://www.geocities.com/thenietzschechannel/human3.htm

In my articles “The Origin of Sin” and “Everything is Perfect” [not yet available online, though available at the time through the school newspaper] I lay out the historical development of this error in reasoning and why it is a theological error, respectively.

Out of curiosity, and for my research, since your dedication to your faith, has your feeling of guilt increased or decreased?

[My friend relates that he had acquired a very painful and debilitating injury at some point in his life. Shortly after praying to God for forgiveness, he was watching a televangelist program in which the particular details of his injury (which he had been living with for some time) were described by one of the hosts, who then said that if the person just described would pray to God for healing, God was ready to heal the condition. He then prayed to God and made a deal: if God would heal him, he would dedicate the rest of his life to spreading God's word. When he awoke the next day, his pain was entirely gone, and his functionality had been restored.]

If I were particularly skeptical about this type of phenomena, I could talk about how with an audience large enough, someone will probably fit their description (someone has to win the lottery), or that the relief of pain falls into a psychosomatic category—it's not like regrowing a limb, for example. But I see no reason to dismiss the possibility either of extra-sensory perception (their describing your condition) or spiritual healing (you no longer having pain). Cross-culturally, these are normal human experiences. There are reports of such occurrences common to all peoples at all times—though people tend to overlay their own religious ideology onto the experience that occurs. This is a jumping to conclusions—not a critical evaluation of the experience itself and a thoughtful appraisal of what can actually be claimed based on that experience. Like I said, many people are not spiritually literate, and so they jump to conclusions. The televangelist group you mention (and you) may very well have access to spiritual forces, but that doesn’t mean that their interpretation of those forces is accurate. The fact that other groups around the world and throughout history with diverse ideologies (one god, many gods, no god) report the same cases (not to mention the fact that the main tenets of Christianity are the result of a demonstrable historical process of myth-making) is strong evidence against accepting their interpretation. Now a reply a Christian that attended one of our Freethinker Union meetings gave was that sometimes what looks like a healing is really just a demon that was causing harm choosing to stop. That’s very convenient, isn’t it? But, besides the fact that this contradicts what Jesus is supposed to have said about the matter (Mark 3:22-30), we are left with the fact that the empirical evidence is exactly the same in their cases as in yours, and it would be special pleading to interpret your claims as different from theirs without evidence that actually warrants distinguishing them.

[Special Pleading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_pleading]

“Jesus came from Galilee and was in many ways a typical Galilean prophet, at least as he is portrayed in Mark and Matthew. Exorcisms and healings of the sick were a standard part of the repertoire of other Galilean prophets as well (see Vermez 1973). Galileans were considered by Judeans to be largely ignorant of the fine points of Jewish Law, in part because they retained their provincial identity and resisted the political, economic and cultural dominance of Judea. Many of Jesus' disagreements with the Pharisees (who were very concerned with upholding the Law) were typical of Galilean laxity toward the Law, which was viewed by many Galileans as a vehicle of Judean dominance over Galilee. For this reason, the general Judean attitude towards Galilean prophets was a condescending one, not unlike the attitude that many mainstream Christians today have towards fundamentalist preachers in Appalachia and the rural South.”

http://www.drabruzzi.com/jesus_movement.htm

Let me tell you a story. A friend of mine studies the out-of-body-experience—another cross-cultural phenomenon. These are the sorts of descriptions we get from people that have out-of-body-experiences: When leaving one's body, one finds oneself in a sort of “extra-physical realm” in which one can both observe and to some degree interact with the physical realm as well as other planes of existence, but also in which one's thoughts and expectations have an immediate effect on one's experience. (Some would say that thoughts directly effect reality in this realm, too, but that here there is a time delay, and in the “astral plane” it is instantaneous.) Have you ever seen the movie What Dreams May Come? It’s very much like that. One also has the opportunity to interact with any number of different types of consciousnesses, some benevolent, some malevolent, etc.

Well anyway, my friend has this aunt who is a fundamentalist Christian. He asked her one time why she was, and she told him her story. She said she didn’t use to be. She was raised Christian but never really believed it. But then one night something amazing happened. She woke up and found herself lifting out of her body. She encountered this wonderful being of light, and then she snapped back into her body feeling wonderful and full of wonderful energy. This proved to her two things: 1. There was a God, and 2. Christianity was true. Now notice, neither of these things were present in her actual experience—but she jumps to these conclusions because they are the only context for this experience that she has. A Hindu would come to a very different conclusion from this experience, as would a Buddhist, or a Muslim. They would all probably interpret it in such a way as to reinforce their own perspective, independent of the evidence.

But it gets worse than that, because if we accept the principle set forth by those that have out-of-body-experiences (based on their experiences)—that in “extra-physical” realms thoughts directly and immediately effect the reality one experiences—then we now have two problems. Not only do people interpret their experiences through the filter of their ideology, but when accessing “extra-physical” realms, because thoughts immediately effect the reality one experiences, the beliefs themselves can have a distorting effect on the experience. So someone may see “Jesus” because they expect to see Jesus, or “the Buddha” because they expect to see the Buddha. It may also be that a consciousness they encounter, benevolent or malevolent, may intentionally take on one of these forms.

In Buddhism they talk about Upaya—expedient means. They would say that the Bodhisattvas interact with people on the level and in the context that those individuals can understand. They might say, for example, that Jesus was a Bodhisattva, but that since the people he was talking to had no concept of that, he used the context they did have to teach and help them. It is pretty much how Buddhists explain every other religion—as opposed to the Christian method of calling other religions either delusional or pacts with devils.

But anyway, if an entity is benevolent, it's entirely possible that it would take on a familiar form in order to help someone in a way they can accept and recognize. Likewise, a malevolent spirit might take on the form of an accepted spiritual figure because it knows it can manipulate people that way. As you work more with spiritual matters you learn to be able to distinguish things by how their energy feels (something that cannot be hidden) rather than how it just appears on the surface. But an inquiring and parsimonious mind would also seem useful in being able to shatter illusions in a realm where thoughts have an immediate effect on the reality one experiences.

Or, as Sam Harris explains it:

“I have no doubt that your acceptance of Christ coincided with some very positive changes in your life. Perhaps you regularly feel rapture or bliss while in prayer. I do not wish to denigrate any of these experiences. I would point out, however, that billions of other human beings, in every time and place, have had similar experiences—but they had them while thinking about Krishna, or Allah, or the Buddha, while making art or music, or while contemplating the sheer beauty of nature. There is no question that it is possible for us to have profoundly transformative experiences. And there is no question that it is possible for us to misinterpret these experiences and to further delude ourselves about the nature of the universe.”

http://www.secularhumanism.org/index.php?section=library&page=sharris_26_4

[My friend says that having been healed, it was his turn to fulfill his half of the bargain. He asserts that Jesus came to earth to 1) teach humanity the proper way to live, 2) reveal God's true nature, and 3) take on humanity's penalty. He asserts that we all deserve to be separated from God forever, but that Jesus is able to redeem us from this status.]

I believe in a God without limits. In saying that, I don't mean that such a being exists, necessarily. Rather, it is a value assertion: that I side with life and being. I often feel rapture or bliss at the wonderful interconnectedness of life. That being said, however, the God you describe seems small and strange. “Deserve” is a human concept born out of human limitation, as is “penalty.” Because a given society has limited resources, it ranks individuals—it has to decide who “deserves” this or that. God has no limitation, thus the concept of deserve makes no sense from the point of view of God. Likewise, a penalty is something human beings impose to keep order. We feel threatened by things, and so we punish. Hobbes does a wonderful job explaining this:

In the state of nature we are faced with four realities: 1. Limited Resources, 2. Unlimited Desire, 3. Equality of Strength (some people are smarter, and some people are stronger, but no one is so much smarter and so much stronger that they can take everyone else on), and 4. Limited Altruism (people don’t only care about themselves, but they aren’t so impartial that if two were competing, one could rely on the other to just step aside). This creates a situation in which life is “nasty, brutish, and short,” and so we remove the Equality of Strength by creating a Leviathan—the government—to establish rules and keep order.

But this is a human product, for human purposes, born out of human limitations. Furthermore, penalties that exist are the result of a failure of the system. If we look throughout history, we find that stable communities have the fewest rules and penalties, whereas unstable ones have the most and harshest. If a state had infinite power and stability, it would not make murder illegal, it would render murder impossible. And as for those that wished to murder—if such a wish could even survive as anything but a passing idea when separated from any practical possibility of actualizing it—they would not be treated with hatred, since they pose no threat, but with either compassion, curiosity, or indifference. (I should point out that when talking about a state with infinite power one may imagine a totalitarian regime, but that is actually the opposite of what I am describing. Totalitarian regimes control so much of the lives of the people because they are seeking to hold together a situation that is fundamentally unstable—it is indicative of their lack of power.)

Perfect power means the ultimate freedom for what one can allow, just as perfect love means allowing ultimate freedom to the object of one’s love. Also, if anything was ever separated from God at all it would mean a limit for God. A God without limits is never separated from anything.

[end]

Now, I'm not saying that I'm particularly good at dialogue. This is my attempt at it. I'd like to see a more formalized methodology developed. It may be good to incorporate more reflective listening and open ended questions. But I'm not tied to any particular methodology a priori—I'm just interested in learning what's effective for helping us all to talk and come to common understandings. I think everyone has something to teach me which I do not already know, and that I have something to teach any given person that that person does not already know.

Agnosticism, contrary to popular belief, is not primarily a position on the existence of God. Rather, as it was originally coined by T. H. Huxley, it is an epistemological model whereby one only claims to have knowledge about things that are demonstrable. Most atheists, for example, are atheists (do not posit a belief in God) because they are agnostics.

http://www.geocities.com/paulntobin/atheistdefine.html

http://www.geocities.com/paulntobin/atheismfaq.html

That being said, this epistemological model seems to combine with different sorts of dispositions. There are, as I see it, three types of agnostics:

AgnoApathos: From apathy, a lack of passion or state of disinterest. Those that admit ignorance as to the nature of existence but do not care, as it seems irrelevant in their lives and to them personally. Essentially one who says, “I don't know and don't care” or “I can't know, so I don't care.”

AgnoPathos: From empathy, the state of identifying with or experiencing something vicariously. Those that wish they could believe a given set of principles on faith and/or that they could become a member of a particular religion that they feel close to, but do not feel that they can take such a leap of faith. Christian Agnostics of this variety often associate with “Doubting Thomas.” An AgnoPathos would say, “I wish this was true” or “I want to believe this.”

AgnoMystic: From mysticism, the attempt to directly commune with the nature of existence. Those that admit to their own ignorance as to the nature of existence but who seek knowledge of and/or union with such. The AgnoMystic statement is “I don't know, but I want to know."

Of the three, I like the third the best.

If you identify with the message of this article, please email it to people, tell your friends, even print out copies to pass around. Together we can raise awareness. Thank you.

Authors Website: http://bendench.blogspot.com/

Authors Bio:
Ben Dench graduated valedictorian of his class from The Richard Stockton College of New Jersey in the Spring Semester of 2007 with a B.A. in philosophy (his graduation speech, which received high praise, is available on YouTube). He is currently enrolled in the Pebble Hill School of Sacred Ministry, where he is studying to be an interfaith minister. His interests include all forms of experiential and technique oriented spirituality, especially shamanism and the out-of-body-experience; social justice, including environmentalism and building a sustainable global community; and the study of how to live effectively and maximize human potential.