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 would take offense at that. Your pushback on this has a similar feel to it.
it involves an actual perceptual deficit
Fair enough. Let me choose a different analogy then: some people have a subjective experience called "empathy" which manifests as a visceral revulsion at, for example, deliberately inflicting pain on another person even in situations where inflicting such pain might provide a net benefit to the inflicter. Some people don't experience empathy. This is widely considered pathological.
Note that this has nothing to do with any objective judgement about the state of the world. Sociopaths and psychopaths know that other people experience pain, they just don't care.
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
The truth is important to me, yes. But the word "abnormal" is really heavily loaded, so I wouldn't use it, just like I wouldn't use "deficiency" without being prompted. Most people are straight, so technically being straight is normal and so one could argue that not being straight is "abnormal". But by that standard, having red hair is abnormal. That is not what most people mean when they say "abnormal."
You seem to want to read a value judgement into my choice of words which I do not intend. So let me try this: If you're white you have a deficiency in skin pigmentation, and this deficiency leads to an inability to tolerate a lot of sun exposure without injury. Despite using the words "deficiency" and "inability" this is intended to be a mere statement of fact, not a value judgement. That is the sense in which I intend such words to be read when it comes to the "ability" to have spiritual experiences. Having spiritual experiences (or not) is neither good not bad, just different.
skeptics reading it could be forgiven for feeling a bit insulted at the suggestion that they need to be told it
What can I say? I've met many people who vehemently deny it. In fact, I've had a personal conversation with Richard Dawkins where he vehemently denied it. That's one of the things that motivated me to start writing about this.
It's funny, I have a very similar experience when I talk to people about quantum mechanics. The world bifurcates rather neatly into two camps: those who think what I'm saying is obvious and common knowledge, and those who think I'm a category 5 loon. And there are card-carrying physicists in both camps.
I thought we were being civil here.
I was aiming for "funny" rather than "rude"; I'm sorry if I missed. (But personally I think your continued insistence on applying negative-valence terminology to Those Who Do Not Have Spiritual Experiences is much ruder than anything I've said in this discussion.)
Your pushback on this has a similar feel to it.
Deafness, like colour-blindness, involves an objectively measurable loss of sensory function. Whether that justifies using terms like "disability", or whether e.g. membership in t...
[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.