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 the Deaf community is a sufficiently important counterbalancing good to make such terms inappropriate, is perhaps debatable; but again it seems to me that you are drawing an analogy where the central feature of the thing on one side of the analogy is not present on the other.
My pushback consists mostly of pointing that out. It therefore doesn't seem very similar to me.
Some people don't experience empathy. This is widely considered pathological.
I think what's usually "officially" reckoned pathological, if you look in the DSM or whatever, is not lack of empathy as such but psychopathy, a condition identified not merely by lack of empathy but by other underlying characteristics and outward effects including lack of concern for the welfare of others. Perhaps lack of empathy itself should be reckoned pathological, though, so let's proceed with that stipulation.
So let's consider why not having empathy is (or might be, or should be) considered pathological, when (e.g.) not having much melanin in your skin, or not having an appendix, is not. It seems to me that there are two reasons. First: not having empathy not infrequently leads to severe adverse consequences for other people: psychopaths are greatly overrepresented in the criminal population, for instance. Severe adverse consequences are an important part of what leads things to be reckoned pathologies. Second: not having empathy is rare. That's not a necessary condition for calling something a pathology, but it helps; in doubtful cases, things present in a large fraction of the population are more likely to be reckoned just "normal variation" rather than pathology.
I mentioned "not having much melanin" as an example earlier, and actually it's an informative one. If you merely have rather little melanin, you're called "white-skinned" and that's regarded as a normal condition. If you have none at all (and other things that tend to go along with having none at all) you're called "albino" and that's regarded as a pathology. Why? I think for the same reasons as I gave above: albinism is worse for you than merely being "white", and much rarer.
Can we bring that parallel back to the case of psychopathy? I think so. Psychopathy is what you get when someone has no empathy at all, along with other unusual features that tend to coexist with absence of empathy, and there are substantial bad effects. (Just as albinism is what you get when someone has no melanin at all, along with other unusual features that tend to coexist with that, and there are substantial bad effects.) There is substantial variation in empathy within the "normal" population, though (just as there is substantial variation in amount of melanin and hence in skin tone) and people who are merely rather low in empathy are not generally considered pathological, though they might well be considered not very nice.
(There's an important difference; so far as I know, there aren't mostly-discrete populations with substantially different empathy levels, in the way that there are mostly-discrete populations with substantially different melanin levels.)
OK, enough preparatory stuff. How does this apply to the sorts of transcendent experiences we're talking about? How close is your analogy? Let's see.
First of all (dammit, more preparatory stuff; sorry) I think we need to clarify a thing or two about those experiences, because you've written about them in a rather black-and-white way: religious people have these experiences, skeptics don't have them, and that's why one group is religious and the other is skeptical. I've already suggested that actually both the "discordant" categories have plenty of people in them, but I want to draw attention to another relevant fact: having-these-experiences isn't a binary thing. Not only because the frequency of such experiences can vary continuously, but also because there's a continuum of experiences of this type, ranging from transcendent life-changing brain-buggering ones down to minor ones you might barely notice. The less dramatic ones are more common, and I suggest that what you might call "low-grade" spiritual experiences -- a sense of great awe at something like the Grand Canyon or the starry sky, a passing feeling of exhilaration for no particular reason, briefly losing your sense of individuality at a concert or political rally, etc., etc., etc. -- are quite common even among the actively anti-religious. Even, e.g., everyone's favourite skeptical punching bag, Richard Dawkins. Unless, of course, you define your terms so that those who don't interpret their experiences as encounters with a non-natural reality are ipso facto not having that kind of experience; I hope you can see the problems that that would raise.
Now, exactly what I want to say about the analogy between spiritual experiences and empathy depends on exactly what we count as "having transcendent experiences". How often? How dramatic?
If you mean having quite dramatic ones quite often: In this case, my impression is that even among the actively religious most people don't have dramatic spirtiual experiences often. So not-having-the-experiences would be not merely within the range of normal variation, but actually the majority situation. What about the adverse-effects criterion? Well, on the one hand, dramatic spiritual experiences are generally greatly treasured by those who have them, so not having them seems like it involves missing out on something valuable. On the other hand, dramatic spirirtual experiences seem to be systematically misleading: those who have them are disproportionately likely to embrace factually incorrect metaphysical theses with enough enthusiasm that it redirects the course of their lives, so having them seems like a dangerous business. This all looks to me to have rather the same shape as taking mind-altering drugs: the effects can be pleasant or overwhelming or life-alteringly overwhelming, but pursuing them can take over your life and lead you to situations you really wouldn't have wanted to be in before you started. I think it's far from clear that the adverse consequences of not having the experiences are worse than those of having them.
If you mean having low-grade ones not so often: In this case, my impression is that very many of the people you're taking aim at (including the one target you've mentioned twice by name, Richard Dawkins) do "have the experiences", so the question of whether not having them should be considered pathological is kinda irrelevant.
But the word "abnormal" is really heavily loaded, so I wouldn't use it
But you were perfectly happy to use its opposite, "normal", in a way that makes it clear you consider Those Who Do Not Have The Experiences to be not-normal: "a normal part of the wiring of the human brain that is missing from their brains". Saying "group A lacks a normal part of the human brain" may not use the word "abnormal", but it most certainly uses the concept.
You seem to want to read a value judgement into my choice of words which I do not intend.
If you don't intend such a value judgement, then I am at a loss to understand why even when you say you are trying to avoid loaded terms you are so insistent on, er, using loaded terms.
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.
What, specifically, did Richard Dawkins deny?
If you mean only that he wasn't willing to use the loaded language you prefer, to treat Not Having The Experiences as a deficit, an abnormality, a thing like psychopathy and colour-blindness -- yeah, sure, I dare say he wasn't, but (as I thought I'd made very clear) that isn't what I'm saying is commonplace.
If you mean something else: what did he deny? That some religious people have dramatic religious experiences? That some skeptics don't? That having dramatic religious experiences tends to make people more inclined to believe in a religion? (These are all things I would be surprised to find him denying, but he's done surprising things before.) Or what?
It's funny, I have a very similar experience when I talk to people about quantum mechanics
I wouldn't generally advise being worried on account of being called a loon by Luboš Motl, who has rather eccentric ideas about what constitutes lunacy. But, without making any comment on whether either his complaints or those of the unspecified other people who think what you're saying is boringly familiar are correct, it seems to me that there's no inconsistency. Motl says you've misrepresented exactly what the Copenhagen interpretation says and have made a mistake about polarization of light. As to the former, if you say "Copenhagen says X but actually Y" then Motl can be right if actually Copenhagen says something other than X, and the other guys can be right if every practising quantum physicist already accepts Y. As to the latter, what you say can be mostly correct and obvious even if there are a couple of mistakes in there.
So I'm not seeing the inconsistency there any more than here.
(In any case, I hope it's clear that being attacked from both sides is no guarantee of being right.)
I was aiming for "funny" rather than "rude"; I'm sorry if I missed.
OK, I'm sorry if I was being humor-impaired.
Deafness, like colour-blindness, involves an objectively measurable loss of sensory function.
You'll have to take this up with someone in the deaf community because I'm on your side of this particular issue. Nonetheless, the fact is that there exist deaf people who vehemently disagree with both of us on this.
So let's consider why not having empathy
You're getting too far into the weeds here. I brought up empathy not ...
[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.