I wouldn't say that.
Sorry, I wasn't clear enough: the "you" and "I" there were so called just for convenience. I wouldn't say the things "I" say in that paragraph, either. (And, for the avoidance of doubt, I agree that both the answers you say you might give are better than a flat "No, you didn't". Of course.)
"Obligation" is an odd word to use here. [...] I don't want to quibble over terminology.
Well, the whole point of what you've been saying here seems to be that skeptics who argue against religious beliefs are (or at least many of them are) doing something wrong, that instead of arguing over religious beliefs they should be empathizing with religious experiences or something like that.
I agree that understanding things is better than not understanding them. But understanding any specific thing is not always a high priority.
If prayers to a particular god were answered more often than prayers to some other god, that would be pretty convincing evidence [...]
Of course. Perhaps I was unclear: I didn't mean "nothing that could possibly happen would constitute strong evidence", I meant "no purely internal religious experience would constitute strong evidence". (With the proviso I stated, of course.) In other words, the sort of "experience" that I thought this whole discussion was about.
fundamentalist wackos
Plenty of people who are not in any useful sense fundamentalist wackos believe that the world was created by a superbeing of vast power and goodness. And while wanting gay people stoned to death is probably in wacko-only territory, there are plenty of non-wackos who want gay people not to be allowed to marry one another for reasons that are ultimately pretty similar to the wackos' reasons.
some people who profess to believe in God are actually [...] allies in many other matters
Yup, absolutely true. I don't think this is as little understood as I think you think it is.
less inflammatory rhetoric
If all you're saying is that in many contexts it is better not to insist on talking about sky fairies and telling religious people they're crazy -- why, yes, I agree. And, again, my impression is that most people here do too.
Although LW is on the whole a pretty unreligious place, there are active members here who are religious believers, and I don't think they get abused for it. And from time to time someone comes along and says, more or less, "hi, I'm a believer but sympathetic to rationalism; can we talk?" and the responses mostly seem pretty respectful and polite to me. See, e.g., this post from a believer leaning towards agnosticism and wanting thoughts on miracles, though of course the "I might deconvert" framing may have made people nicer.
Well, my OP was not written specifically for LW, and it's possible that posting it here was not appropriate, at least not without some significant revisions. If so, I apologize. I'll try to do better next time.
[Originally published at Intentional Insights in response to Religious and Rational]
Spirituality and rationality seem completely opposed. But are they really?
To get at this question, let's start with a little thought experiment. Consider the following two questions:
1. If you were given a choice between reading a physical book (or an e-book) or listening to an audiobook, which would you prefer?
2. If you were given a choice between listening to music, or looking at the grooves of a phonograph record through a microscope, which would you prefer?
But I am more interested in the answer to a third question:
3. For which of the first two questions do you have a stronger preference between the two options?
Most people will have a stronger preference in the second case than the first. But why? Both situations are in some sense the same: there is information being fed into your brain, in one case through your ears and in the other through your eyes. So why should people's preference for ears be so much stronger in the case of music than books?
There is something in the essence of music that is lost in the translation between an audio and a visual rendering. The same loss happens for words too, but to a much lesser extent. Subtle shades of emphasis and tone of voice can convey essential information in spoken language. This is one of the reasons that email is so notorious for amplifying misunderstandings. But the loss in much greater in the case of music.
The same is true for other senses. Color is one example. A blind person can abstractly understand what light is, and that color is a byproduct of the wavelength of light, and that light is a form of electromagnetic radiation... yet there is no way for a blind person to experience subjectively the difference between red and blue and green. But just because some people can't see colors doesn't mean that colors aren't real.
The same is true for spiritual experiences.
Now, before I expand that thought, I want to give you my bona fides. I am a committed rationalist, and an atheist (though I don't like to self-identify as an atheist because I'd rather focus on what I *do* believe in rather than what I don't). So I am not trying to convince you that God exists. What I want to say is rather that certain kinds of spiritual experiences *might* be more than mere fantasies made up out of whole cloth. If we ignore this possibility we risk shutting ourselves off from a vital part of the human experience.
I grew up in the deep south (Kentucky and Tennessee) in a secular Jewish family. When I was 12 my parents sent me to a Christian summer camp (there were no other kinds in Kentucky back in those days). After a week of being relentlessly proselytized (read: teased and ostracized), I decided I was tired of being the camp punching bag and so I relented and gave my heart to Jesus. I prayed, confessed my sins, and just like that I was a member of the club.
I experienced a euphoria that I cannot render into words, in exactly the same way that one cannot render into words the subjective experience of listening to music or seeing colors or eating chocolate or having sex. If you have not experienced these things for yourself, no amount of description can fill the gap. Of course, you can come to an *intellectual* understanding that "feeling the presence of the holy spirit" has nothing to do with any holy spirit. You can intellectually grasp that it is an internal mental process resulting from (probably) some kind of neurotransmitter released in response to social and internal mental stimulus. But that won't allow you to understand *what it is like* any more than understanding physics will let you understand what colors look like or what music sounds like.
Happily, there are ways to stimulate the subjective experience that I'm describing other than accepting Jesus as your Lord and Savior. Meditation, for example, can produce similar results. It can be a very powerful experience. It can even become addictive, almost like a drug.
I am not necessarily advocating that you go try to get yourself a hit of religious euphoria (though I wouldn’t discourage you either -- the experience can give you some interesting and useful perspective on life). Instead, I simply want to convince you to entertain the possibility that people might profess to believe in God for reasons other than indoctrination or stupidity. Religious texts and rituals might be attempts to share real subjective experiences that, in the absence of a detailed modern understanding of neuroscience, can appear to originate from mysterious, subtle external sources.
The reason I want to convince you to entertain this notion is that an awful lot of energy gets wasted by arguing against religious beliefs on logical grounds, pointing out contradictions in the Bible and whatnot. Such arguments tend to be ineffective, which can be very frustrating for those who advance them. The antidote for this frustration is to realize that spirituality is not about logic. It's about subjective experiences that not everyone is privy to. Logic is about looking at the grooves. Spirituality is about hearing the music.
The good news is that adopting science and reason doesn’t mean you have to give up on spirituality any more than you have to give up on music. There are myriad paths to spiritual experience, to a sense of awe and wonder at the grand tapestry of creation, to the essential existential mysteries of life and consciousness, to what religious people call “God.” Walking in the woods. Seeing the moons of Jupiter through a telescope. Gathering with friends to listen to music, or to sing, or simply to share the experience of being alive. Meditation. Any of these can be spiritual experiences if you allow them to be. In this sense, God is everywhere.