Confessions of a Teenage Hope Fiend: How I learned to stop worrying and love the ‘Ommm….’.

"And then I did what all parents dread will happen to their children if they get into the wrong crowd - I started dabbling in philosophy. It all began with the weak, relatively harmless stuff: Sophie's World by Jostein Gaarder. But we all know that's a gateway to harder stuff, and that it inevitably leads to Kant and Heidegger."

-          Zoe Markillie, comment on the last post 

 

Hi, I’m Agnonymous, and I have a habit. 

Religion isn’t something I do, but I can’t leave it alone.

If I try to look back and find some precipitate event, all I see is evidence that I always had this need, this compulsion, to test the edges of my beliefs in the crucible of other peoples’. I see myself as a child deciding that I wasn’t going to sing the hymns at my primary school. I wasn’t Christian, so it wasn’t appropriate - right? Then - a little while later – it occurs to me that the value of the songs and the fun of singing them might be separate from their value as theology or a statement of belief. It might be okay for me to sing - and in any case while I may know what I’m not, it’s not at all clear what I am. It may have been fateful that I got in trouble for this – some fellow student asked why I was singing again, and for some reason took my “It was stupid” to refer to the songs and not my unwillingness to sing and thereby felt the only proper response was to inform The Authorities. One wonders what the teacher in question made of a nine-year old’s theology as a justification. In any case, I was still in trouble.  

Actually, defining yourself in terms of the negation of the other is handy when your own ideas are still a bit embryonic. Maybe that explains my rather staunch anti-theist pose in my early teens (even when it wasn’t indiscriminately anti-religious). This pose was odd, because no-one was really trying to impose a theistic point of view on me – my family if anything was possibly Buddhist, and a few jaunty hymns was about as religious as my school got. But a safely imaginary oppressor is a wonderful thing for a fragile identity, and it’s easier to explain you are against The Evil Church of Inquisition and  Dogma than that nice Dalai Lama man . This can be seen in the fact that some people I grew up with seemed fairly clear on their Christians, Muslims and Sikhs, but were less than 100% on the differences between Buddhists, Hare Krishna’s and Jews.

“Did it hurt when you were circumcised?”

As with any habit, terrible role models and a bad crowd didn’t help. Among these were The Ascended Master of Rhetoric incarnated in my father, as well as my very good friend who – despite apparently agreeing with me on all the ways the arguments for theism were ridiculous – remained stubbornly Muslim.  One terrible and two terrific Religious Education teachers later (Mrs H and Mr H, you’re the latter if you ever happen to read this), I’m just about ready to accept the idea that I might be less concerned with the ways in which I disagree with other people’s PoVs and lend some thought to what I do believe. It’s probably telling that at this point the one Argument For God I found difficult to respond to was Pascal’s Wager. The arguments points out - under the assumption of a existing god - the finite cost but infinite gain of belief (the good place) versus the finite gain but infinite cost of unbelief (the other place). If god doesn't exist, you've lose nothing by belief - its a finite cost for a finite 'benefit'. Given the distribution of risks and benefits, says the Wager, wouldn't the rational and reasonable man give that ol’time religion a go? Sure, one can make several responses (Wouldn’t such disingenuous belief –if it’s even possible – annoy god? Which god are we talking about, anyway?), but they’re mostly issues with its application, not a problem with the internal logic of the argument itself (compare this).  

   

So, I come to the point were I’m interested in working out whatI do believe. Theism was never my thing, but I dabbled in other habit-forming ideas – Wicca, Buddhism, vague-new-age-Spiritualism. I even spent some time as a lay community member in a Monastery. In fact, it was probably the latter that put the final nail in the idea that I was ever going to be a believer with a capital ‘b’. I was fascinated by religion: by the ritual trappings; the philosophy; the internal psychology of believers. I could even make use of the spiritual exercises I've learned for my own mental housekeeping. But a wholesale joiner of the club I was not, and probably never would be. 

So I’m more or less at peace with my obsession, now. I’m not offended by people’s beliefs or their Beliefs, in fact I’m often fascinated. On the other hand, I know what I think  and what I think I know, and I’ll fight my intellectual corner if I see the need. One is merely real life. The other is philosophy. And that’s serious. 

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Ultimate Whys and Other Lies, on the Uses and Abuses of How.

"The magisterium of science covers the empirical realm: what the Universe is made of (fact) and why does it work in this way (theory). The magisterium of religion extends over questions of ultimate meaning and moral value. These two magisteria do not overlap, nor do they encompass all inquiry (consider, for example, the magisterium of art and the meaning of beauty)."

-          Stephen J. Gould, Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life

On my actual and ideal bookshelves, a good proportion of the biology and science section is taken up by the works of Stephen J. Gould. Primarily a palaeontologist and evolutionary biologist, he was also something of a renaissance man of science and reason-based letters – a historian of science and a popular essayist, a constructive gadfly of overzealous evolutionism and remorseless critic of ill-informed anti-evolutionism. A wielder of facts to defeat politicized science, and a relentless pointer-outer of great big elephants in our collective cultural rooms. 

As you may have guessed, I’m something of a fan. Paradoxically, that’s why I’m sort of avoiding another of his books that would be perfect fodder for this blog – see the quote at the start of the post. Not having read it, I’m not about to write some kind of pre-emptive review – and when I do read it I’m sure you’ll hear about it here. It’s not about disagreeing with him – I don’t agree with everything I’ve read of his previously and my enjoyment of his work is as much about how he says things as about what he says. As with C.S. Lewis, a worthy disagreement can be more satisfying than an easy consensus. It’s more that I came across this quote while researching a different post, and it seems to me to represent a conversational trope – as lazy as it common as it is oft-repeated - that might actually make me think less of one of my intellectual heroes if it is the argument he’s making.

Science, we are told, deals in the how. Religion, on the other hand, trades in the great and wonderful why. I don’t plan to stamp my feet and demand that science be let into the circle of arbiters of ultimate meaning. Rather, I want to challenge the idea that faith has unique – or any – access to the domain of transcendent meaningfulness. Indeed, on one level I doubt that it has any greater access than any other form of ‘how’.

Science and religion, on one level, are stories – whatever else they may be on other levels. For the supernatural there’s the range from fairy tale to the future history of the End of Days. For science you have the (actually incorrect but usefully didactic) atom-as-solar-system-model, and you have the standard model or quantum electrodynamics . Both are models for events, causal stories where this causes this by way of that. At this level, both kinds of stories are of the ‘how’ variety, but the claim is that one kind – religious stories – can level-up to the ‘why’ by virtue of their claims about transcendent realities and/or entities. But if these things are truly transcendent, aren’t they by necessity beyond the ken of people like you and me? Isn’t this precisely what we mean when we talk about the ‘mysterious ways’ in which god allegedly moves. Or, if you prefer, akin to the buddha’s unanswered questions.

Both kinds of stories make claims about reality beyond the subjective. But even if science and/or religion have a claim on objective truth and ultimate meanings, the only way you and I get to experience that is though our own limited window on the world. It’s like the blind men in a room with an elephant, each being able to touch and know a small part of the Whole. The total creature, the ultimate Why, may exist or it may not. All we know - for sure – is that there many small creators of small, personal stories of what’s happening and what that may mean. Tiny beautiful proximate hows and infinitesimal, idiosyncratic whys. The meaning, and the arbiters moral value, are you and me, and our worldviews conform to that. To argue that a subset of views are special because there’s a special set of rules that applies only to them is delusional and/or disingenuous. You're reading my account of how I think different views fare under the same criteria. What you make of that, necessarily, is down to you.

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Give it a whirl: Berlin's Long Night of Religions, By Zoe Markillie

Earlier this year, the first Atheist Church was launched in London, with sermons on science by Professor Brian Cox, and Stevie Wonder hits replacing the usual hymns. The underlying principle was that a sense of community and unity in belief is something that need not be limited to the religious but rather should be shared by everyone, including atheists. In an ever-increasingly individualised world, so the theory goes, why not provide an opportunity for the unspiritual to gather every Sunday with like-minded people and discuss the big questions of life?

It’s not the first time that atheists have chosen to take something from religious practices, and I consider it for the most part a healthy attitude – or at least better than a Dawkinsesque ‘you’re all morons’ approach. And it’s a two-way process, with many religious groups becoming more and more open to outsiders. Which is how I ended up spending my Saturday night learning about the complex family tree of the Hindu gods, being hit in the face with the robes of a Whirling Dervish, and watching a Sikh put a book to bed.

As part of its cultural programme, Berlin organises a Long Night of Religions every year – all the places of worship around the city are open to visitors of any (or no) faith between 6pm and midnight, with many providing talks, demonstrations and music. Keen to learn about some of the less well-represented religions – like most Brits, my RE lessons consisted mostly of what Christians and Jews think about various issues – I didn’t bother with any of the churches or synagogues, and I had already visited a mosque during an open day last summer. So instead, the evening’s activities consisted of visits to a Hindu temple, a Sufi centre, a Buddhist temple and a Sikh gurdwara.

The warm welcome I received from all of these places seemed less of a sales ploy than I had expected; the people of the different faiths appeared to be genuinely pleased that I was interested in learning about their religion and not set on converting me. In particular, the Sikhs were openly willing to answer any questions, and insisted on serving us all food, despite the fact that we had guiltily snuck out of the prayer room before the end. And the Sufis not only did not require the female visitors to cover their heads, but also offered the same respectful welcome and ‘salaam alaikum’ to a group of girls who wandered in wearing strappy tops and hotpants.

As well as being educational in the expected sense, I also learned the first rule of watching Dervishes: don’t sit in the front row. But when not ducking out of the way of the spinning robes, I was struck by the elated expressions on their faces. Whatever incredible inner place they were in, I wanted to be there too. Sufism promotes joy and euphoria as a way of connecting with God, but could this be something that atheists can experience too?

As an oriental dancer, I have attended a few dance camps which involved a ritual called the ‘zar’. This is a middle-Eastern tradition which is a form of Dervish whirling for laymen; it is used for prayer, exorcisms, pain relief and general wellbeing. For us, it was a completely secular religious experience – entering a trancelike state of pure elation without the accompanying connection to a higher being.

I was extremely nervous before my first zar; I’ve always been too sceptical even for meditation, and this seemed to be a weirdly pagan, cult-like ritual. We were led into a dimly-lit space and told to move in whatever way felt right; we needn’t worry about safety as there were supervisors to make sure we didn’t hurt ourselves. Zar, unlike Dervish whirling, is not at all a performance; it is not a pretty sight, and the only people who may be present, other than the participants, are there purely for safety reasons.

As the repetitive Sufi drumming began, I felt ludicrous and self-conscious. I had no idea what to do. I sneaked a glance at the others from the corner of my eye and began to follow suit, turning slowly on the spot. At first, the hardest thing was to remember that this was NOT a performance; as I spun, I had to crush my dancer’s instinct to hold my arms in a beautiful pose and to spot in order to avoid dizziness. The dizziness was part of it. Memories of spinning on the school playground until I fell over, just for the fun of it, came flooding back and I began to enjoy myself.

Unlike Dervish whirling, zars are not limited to on-the-spot turning, and whenever I got tired, I would fall to my knees and fling my head and arms from side to side. The wild movements came naturally now, and I could neither see nor care if anyone was watching me. My limbs were loose and felt separate from my body; my hair was in my eyes and mouth but I didn’t feel it; I simply felt a compulsion to move to the heavy drum beats. I was in a trance without drugs or hypnosis, an entirely self-constructed trance.

Finally, the music came to an end and we all lay still on the floor. Once recovered, we were led one at a time from the room and to our beds. Confused and disorientated, I asked one of the supervisors how long I had been in there – it felt like about ten minutes. She smiled and told me I had just thrown myself around in a dark room for an hour.

The zar affects everyone in different ways. Most feel high, dizzy and very relaxed. For some, the feeling of elation is so intense that they laugh hysterically – as I shuffled to my bedroom, I could hear their cackles echoing down the corridor, and a few dancers are well-known for needing at least 45 minutes to stop giggling after a zar. Others cry uncontrollably for no apparent reason. I know one woman who does the zar every year, and afterwards wails for half an hour with huge, racking sobs that seem to come from some deep unimaginable pain; she assures me she’s not crying about anything in particular, and that she finds it rather therapeutic.

Personally, I feel mostly drunk – carefree, uninhibited, but always aware of what I am doing, and with the feeling that I could stop at any time if I wished. I certainly feel relaxed and happy, but I can never quite reach the peaceful place of the Whirling Dervish. The euphoria rises, and I feel like there could be a connection – but there never is. Is this a problem in me, an inability to allow myself to connect to something greater, or simply that there is nothing to connect to at all? And does it matter in any case, if an atheist can have more or less a religious experience without God?

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Everybody Hurts - and everybody wants to tell you why.

Before, we spoke about Weird Shit. Today, I’d like to talk about Shit that’s actually…well, Shit.

I doubt you’ll find it controversial if I suggest that a strong candidate for poster child of the personal power of religious belief is the respite it can bring from suffering. One of the mainstays of debates on religion is the so-called Problem of Evil. In the abrahamic context, the Problem is the alleged inconsistency of a (one would really, really hope) benevolent god - who also happens to be omnipotent – and the existence of a world that quite patently, when you come down to it, isn’t all gumdrops and roses. I’d rather not get into the details of the centuries of philosophical wrangling that have occurred around this topic, but I do recommend this – by turns calculating, funny and insightful - wiki on the solutions  that have been put forward for this very sticky wicket. Indeed, I would say the real problem is one of Inconsistent Evil, rather than Evil per se. But that’s not our topic. For today at least.

What I draw from the boundless popularity of this trope is not the power of the argument itself but its topic – suffering, both in terms of specific unpleasantnesses and that more general, existential booboo lurking in all our souls – and the fact that any system of thought that wants its time in the sun has to grapple with its existence. Most religions seem to havethe same general responses: You deserve it (it’s your – or better yet, her - fault); it’s good for you; it doesn’t really exist if you would only look at it the right way. You pays your money, you makes your choice. I would say even ‘Science’ has its ideas on the subject. If you are partial to a bit of evolutionary psychology, you might contrast the environment Homo Sapiens sprung up in and the one in which it now finds itself. Take our appetite for sugar say, arguably adaptive in one context but ripe for maladaptive abuse in a context where such goodies are all too readily available. Or the ideas at the core of cognitive behavioral therapy, where anxieties and phobias are understood as the entraining of biological safety mechanisms like ‘flight or flight’ - that broadly and in aggregate are probably not a bad thing to have – to inappropriate stimuli or appropriate stimuli to an unhelpful extent.

Riffing on the theme that traditional doctrinal hooks are often not all that revealing about the beliefs of those that purport hang their hat of on them, do you find any of these answers – including the evolutionary one – all that convincing. At best, they might be – if we’re being charitable - explanations. But are they any of them consolations? 

I don’t know about you – and I would very much like to hear about you – but the perspectives that have helped, be they religious or not, have had some common features. They help you to see the hurt as not personal, not something that you have to worry about or register beyond the time in which they happen. They get you to count your blessings. There but for the grace of god go I. They let you submerge your ego into something, someone or some way bigger that yourself. They provide you with vistas that put your hurt into perspective, to count – carefully and with fuller knowledge of the alternatives – your lucky, lucky stars.

On the personal level, I suppose an explanation isn’t much use even supposing one or any is right. After an explanation, you still have to ask yourself - what now? At that point, I’m willing to let you have your life jacket, if you’ll do me the favour of letting me have mine.   

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When god knocks on your door, how closely to you look at what he’s selling?

“I am no lover of disorder and doubt as such. Rather I fear to lose truth by the pretension to possess it already wholly.” ― William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience

So, you might be forgiven for wondering where a self-avowed atheist gets the presumption that he’s qualified to write about religious experience. Not religious history, nor philosophy, nor the relation of faith and science, but direct honest-to-goodness personal experience of the apparently divine. Never mind that the operating thesis of this blog is that the feelings invoked in religious contexts are a common heritage of human experience, and that there other targets for our feelings of awe, duty and belonging. Never mind that – even if the following weren’t the case – presumption is not something I’m lacking in. No, the reason I feel I have a little something to say on the subject is that I’m no stranger to ‘religious experience’.

I’m not saying I’ve had experience of religion, in the sense of attending ‘church’ and engaging in ritual, although I have that to. I mean a particular, arresting event that on first sight is difficult to process except in the context in which it presents itself: divinely, religiously, miraculously – whatever. Don’t worry - this isn’t a confession of regular visions of messiahood or anything. It’s a story of the kind of Weird Shit I’ve mentioned before, but that happened to me personally and on which I’ve spent a lot of thought. As I’ve said, while it would be wrong to say I was raised Buddhist I was raised around it, and there have been times when that kind of faith has been more appealing. Once upon one of these periods, in an instructional context at a Buddhist centre I decided I couldn’t follow the in-depth notes about a particular technique, so I decided to meditate and just do the visualisations being suggested. After a while, I found myself in what one might call, for the frustrating lack of a better term, an ‘altered state of perception’. The most superficial aspect, and most easily describable, is that all my sensations of touch – the feel of my clothes, the weight of my body, the feeling of a paper clip in my hand – were experienced as something akin to ‘pins and needles’. Paresthesia, if you will. Harder to explain is the sense in which I feel I could ‘see’ the thinness of the phenomenal world, like the screen of a shadow-puppet show. By ‘see’ I don’t mean to romanticise a new intellectual perspective. But nor do I mean the phenomena was merely, or even really, visual either. Enough to say, the experience – not unpleasant while it was occurring – knocked for me for six after I came back to earth, and had me mulling it over for quite some time. 

It might not sound like much, but I can’t stress the lasting effect it had on me. But then, if that’s the case, you might ask why this supposedly religious experience was not also a conversion experience. Certainly, at the time, the pull of more worldly delights was a strong disincentive. But, over the longer term, I have other reasons for viewing this experience as formative, but not definitive in terms of the way I see the world. My academic training provides me with plenty of science babble to nicely box this experience in such a way that I wouldn’t need to think more deeply about its implications – hypnosis, suggestion, hallucination. Such are the terms that safe ‘scepticism’ is usually couched in. That not why the reason you don’t see me in red robes today.

I recently listened to this podcast , ‘A sceptics guide to the mind’, which I heartily recommend. In summary, the guest speaker makes the observation that while feeling and sensations – happiness, recalling a memory, feeling certain – occur in our conscious minds (and/or brains); the process by which they come about isn’t available to us. When you construct a sentence in your native tongue, the words spring to mind and you don’t have to piece a sentence together piecemeal selecting a verb here, a preposition there. When you pick up a cup, the subjective you doesn’t compute the force, the velocity, the geometries required. It just happens. The speaker’s interesting point is that this is also true of feelings of certainty. I may have a sensation of unassailable logical certainty in regards to a proposition, but the certainty is a sensation of mine – produced by a process I have no access to – not a feature of the proposition.

It seems to me something similar hold for the feeling of religious awe, of the numinous, of divine presence. They are a feature of us, whether or not they’re an appropriate reaction to something or someone out there. We, in our heads, don’t know how they arise - we don’t have access to the process that brings them about. So lights, trumpets and warm cuddly feelings aside, one still has to decide for oneself what view of the world makes sense for – or of - them. In the marketplace of ideas, even when the ads are overwhelming, you still have to haggle. 

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