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 because it's exactly the same as spiritual experience sensitivity (I'm going to start abbreviating that as SES) but because it's a purely internal subjective experience and not relatable to anything that is objectively measurable outside the individual brain that is experiencing it. Of course many of the salient details are different, that's why I didn't choose it as my primary example.
religious people have these experiences, skeptics don't have them
I'm not sure whether you wrote that as a statement of your position or a re-statement of what you think my position is, but either way I don't agree with this statement. In fact, I rather belabor the point that I am a skeptic who has spiritual experiences, so I myself am a counterexample.
I also think that a fair number of religious people don't have spiritual experiences. Mother Theresa, for example, probably never had one.
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
No, that really is an unjustified extrapolation on your part. Being heterosexual is normal. It does not follow that being homosexual is abnormal.
Saying "group A lacks a normal part of the human brain" may not use the word "abnormal", but it most certainly uses the concept.
Again, no. Some people are lactose intolerant. They lack the ability to produce the enzyme that digests lactose. This is actually the "normal" state of affairs; the ability to digest lactose arose very late in human evolutionary history. But the ability to digest dairy products is not "abnormal."
You really are reading more into these words than I intend or that is justified by common patterns of usage.
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.
Because English doesn't have enough value-neutral words. How would you describe lactose intolerance without using words that make implicit value judgements? The very name "lactose intolerance" has a value judgement built into it: intolerance.
What, specifically, did Richard Dawkins deny?
I was on an Antarctic cruise with him so we had a lot of conversations over the course of about three weeks. I got to know him quite well on a personal level. He specifically denied a lot of things. The overall tenor of his denials was to make clear that he didn't believe any concession whatsoever should be made to the proposition that some people have firsthand subjective experiences that cause them to believe in the supernatural, even if those beliefs have a net benefit to them. For example: at one point I argued that belief can have demonstrable benefits through the placebo effect. So even if God wasn't real, the idea of God was real and had real and potentially beneficial effects for some people, and so dissuading them of these beliefs was not necessarily a good thing to do. His response was (and these are his exact words -- I will never forget them): "But it's not true." Meaning: it doesn't matter if dissuading people from their belief might send them into existential despair or even cause them actual harm; allowing someone to believe in something that is not objectively true is the greater evil.
you've misrepresented exactly what the Copenhagen interpretation says
Well, there is no universally agreed upon definition of what the Copenhagen interpretation is. But there is no question that the elements I presented are commonly associated with the Copenhagen brand, even if that's not what Motl thinks of when he uses the term.
and have made a mistake about polarization of light
What mistake would that be?
being attacked from both sides is no guarantee of being right
Certainly true, but when one of those attacks is, "What you're saying is so obvious it's insulting for you to think we didn't already know this" and the other is, "What you're saying is so obviously false that it's not even worth a respectful debunking" then I actually feel pretty good about having had something worthwhile to say, even if I might not be right.
I'm not sure whether you wrote that as a statement of your position or a re-statement of what you think my position is
Actually, not quite either; it's intended as a restatement not of your explicitly taken position (which I know it is contrary to) but of what seems to me to be implicit in how you write about these things. You say (and I agree) that some skeptics have "spiritual experiences" and some religious people don't; but I think no one reading the rest of what you write would get that impression.
...Being heterosexual is normal. It does no
[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.