There exists a kind of subjective experience [...]
I think the only part of that paragraph that is in any way controversial is the bit where you say the experience in question is "not a delusion nor an indication of any kind of mental pathology" -- but I think most even of the most fire-breathing atheists wouldn't claim that religious experience as such is a delusion (I think that would be a category error) or pathological. So: so far so good, but not much of substance yet.
(But, on that just-infinitesimally-controversial point -- I remark that the word "real" that you use is at least a little bit loaded, and it's not really clear to me what it means. I mean, what's the alternative? They have this experience but it's a fake experience? What would that even mean? The obvious thing for it to mean is that the experience doesn't have the meaning they think it has; that although it seems to them that what they've experienced is being touched by an angel or spoken to by God or whatever, the real cause of their experience is something very different. But that's the position you yourself have taken, so you surely can't mean "real" in opposition to anything like that.)
Some people do not have firsthand experience of this subjective sensation [...]
Again, true and uncontroversial.
completely analogous to the well-known phenomenon that some people cannot distinguish the colors red and green
Bzzzzt! I think it's very interesting that even when deliberately trying to state your thesis without loaded terms, you apparently just can't help equating not having religious experiences with a deficiency. I suggest that unless religious experiences are actual perceptions of non-natural realities -- a position that AIUI you explicitly reject -- the two things are demonstrably not "completely analogous". Why? Because probably the single most salient thing about that inability-to-distinguish, the thing that explains why it's sometimes called "colour blindness", is that it involves an actual perceptual deficit. In "colour-blind" individuals, an extremely important channel by which information about the external world flows into their brain has substantially less sensitivity, substantially less bandwidth, than in individuals with normal colour vision. The colour-blind get less information about the world through their eyes than the not-colour-blind, and you can measure how much less. Whereas those who don't have "spiritual experiences" ... don't have a particular kind of experience, which by your own account conveys no information about the outside world, no genuine insight into the nature of reality -- it's just an experience that some people have and some people find enjoyable or moving or motivating.
Some people believe in deities because they have had real subjective experiences that they believe in good faith [...] can best be explained as a firsthand interaction with a deity.
Again, true and close to 100% uncontroversial. (Aside from the caveat stated above about the word "real".)
disagreements [...] will become [...] more fruitful if those who have not have these subjective experiences nonetheless acknowledge the possibility that their interlocutors might have had such an experience [...]
So far (I acknowledge that your sentence isn't over yet) this seems true but pointless: so far as I can tell, pretty much everyone acknowledges that. So let's continue and see whether it gets more contentful as the sentence continues.
and that this is not necessarily symptomatic of any kind of pathology or mental deficiency.
Still 100% uncontroversial; so far as I can tell basically no one claims that having religious experiences is necessarily symptomatic of pathology or mental deficiency.
(So, so far, it seems to me that the thesis you're advancing is true but -- my apologies! -- utterly uninteresting. It's as if you were earnestly enjoining us not to punch believers in the face while discussing religion with them: sure, it's good advice, but whatever makes you think we need it? I think this explains some of the negativity in the responses you've had: if you earnestly tell people not to punch believers in the face, they're liable to get the impression that you think they would be punching believers in the face without your advice, and that would be a stupid thing to do, and no one likes being told they're stupid.)
it might be an indication of a normal part of the wiring of the human brain that is missing from their brains
You're really not trying all that hard to avoid loaded terms, are you? :-) I'm getting the impression that for some reason it's really important to you to portray skeptics, or at least some skeptics, as abnormal people with bits missing from their brains that cause them to be in a certain sense blind, like those who cannot distinguish colours. But I'm not sure what that reason is. A cynical hypothesis would be that you like feeling superior to those skeptics, but I bet the truth is more interesting than that. Any idea what it might be?
the explanation [...] may be deeply meaningful to the person that holds this belief [...] presenting them with evidence that this belief is false may be intensely painful
Yup, it may. This is perhaps the least obvious thing you've said, but -- sorry, again -- it's still pretty damn obvious.
although I didn't make this explicit
I think you did. Right back in the OP, you wrote: "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."
So after all this, I think my conclusion is this: with the value-laden bits stripped out, what you're saying is common knowledge, to such an extent that the suggestion that skeptics reading it could be forgiven for feeling a bit insulted at the suggestion that they need to be told it. That feels like a really uncharitable and negative conclusion, which I regret. Perhaps I'm missing something that's genuinely non-obvious, or perhaps I'm overoptimistic about the actual understanding and knowledge of skeptics. If so, perhaps you can point out some bit of what you've said that I should be more surprised by, or something?
I'd like to say a few words on one other point that's maybe getting a bit overlooked in this discussion, which is that there are plenty of religious people who don't have much in the way of religious experiences, plenty more who do but who don't take them to be the main support for their beliefs, and also plenty of skeptics who have very similar experiences but interpret them very differently; and that having such experiences doesn't seem to make skeptics any less abrasive. For instance, Sam Harris (author of, e.g., "The End of Faith", one of the "Four Horsemen" of the New Atheist movement) is a practitioner of meditation, which he says provides him with mystical experiences, but he's every bit as antireligious as, say, Richard Dawkins. On the other side: well, every now and then you get religious "revivals" characterized by fairly widespread religious experiences, often manifesting as things like "speaking in tongues", and what makes them notable is precisely the fact that this is not the usual state of affairs in the churches where they happen. For instance, back in the mid-1990s when I was an evangelical Christian, there was something of a to-do in the UK's evangelical Anglican churches about the so-called Toronto Blessing, and I'm pretty sure that in the churches I frequented this was mostly because most of the people there, most of the time, did not have dramatic religious experiences at all, and they were excited at the prospect of such experiences becoming more common.
So, if plenty of religious people seldom or never have these experiences, and quite a few very vigorously anti-religious people do have them, it seems to me that the difference between having them and not having them can't be that large a part of what makes some people skeptical about religion and others not. I dare say it plays a role sometimes, but it seems like you're suggesting that it's more than that, and I find that unlikely.
Bzzzzt!
Oh, come on. I thought we were being civil here.
you apparently just can't help equating not having religious experiences with a deficiency.
That's right, because I think it is a kind of deficiency, though I would not have used that word if you had not introduced it into the conversation.
There's a lot of controversy within the deaf community about whether being deaf is a deficiency or just another way of being, kind of like being gay. Personally, I think being deaf is a deficiency, but there's a significant faction of the deaf community that ...
[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.