Protip: No, not everyone is spiritual
Jul. 16th, 2012 05:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sabotabbySo Stephen Covey, author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, died today. In a startling coincidence, this was the day everyone in my class had to do their presentations on various habits (they were actually pretty funny because my classmates are cool, but I think the book is bollocks).
One thing that struck me is how often that book, which is ostensibly about leadership and management, segues into religious claptrap. Same with most self-help books, even some of the better ones I've encountered. Of course, they don't call it "religious claptrap." They call it spirituality.*
Everyone, I am told, is spiritual.
No offense to people who are religious, but this one grates. Big time. Especially because "spirituality" outside of the context of New Age nonsense almost always means "Christianity, but we don't want to alienate Jews who might want to buy our book." In this case, there are direct references to "your church" and "reading scriptures," which is pretty specific to one religion that happens to be the dominant one in this part of the world. It's another way that non-Christians and non-theists are erased: "Oh, 'church' could mean 'synagogue' or 'mosque' too! Oh? You don't go to either of those? Well, walk through Nature-with-a-capital-N to renew your spirit. Everyone is spiritual."
Nope. I'm not. I'm completely grounded in the material world. I don't believe in a God, or gods, or fairies in the garden, and haven't since I was a wee child. That's cool if you do, but your assumption that my experience is just an exotic variation of your own is annoying as all fuck. I've never had any sort of religious experience, and it's pretty hard for me to comprehend how people can have religious experiences; I imagine the reverse is just as alien.
I've often been told–and it's generally meant as a compliment—"![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sabotabby isn't religious, but she's one of the most spiritual people I've ever met." Which, yes, is also pretty offensive, and untrue. It makes me think that people just think that I'm lying when I tell them about my beliefs. I think maybe they mean "ethical," maybe, but again, the conflation of ethics with belief in the supernatural is problematic. I do the stuff that I do because I believe that there's no afterlife, no judgment, no punishment, and no reward. Because the here and now is all that matters. To suggest that I'm an activist because subconsciously I'm doing what someone's God wants me to do is to negate my agency as a human being.
To be told that my spiritual wellbeing is an essential part of my fulfillment as a person is to tell me that I'll never be fulfilled as a human being. Fullstop. That's okay, I guess. I might be happier if I were religious, but then, I'd also be happier if I were a billionaire, but we live with our limitations. The problem is I don't think it's actually true. I suspect that religious people live with the same kind of gnawing doubts and empty spaces as atheists do, get just as terrified when their relatives die or when their bodies fail, are just as awful when they get into positions of power and responsibility, and so on. It would be like me suggesting that everyone should be politically involved; that if you're not out on the streets marching with signs, you're neglecting a vital part of your personhood. It's something that I'm into, a lot, but I don't think you're lying to yourself if you're not into it. You probably find it as boring as I find Nature-with-a-capital-N.
So that's my rant for the day. If you should happen to find the phrase, "everyone is spiritual in their own way" bubbling up in your head, clamp a lid on that baby and I'll be quiet about the opiate-of-the-masses thing.
* It's been awhile since my rant about how I respect religious fundamentalists more than cafeteria New Agers, but I'm sure I don't need to go into it again. Right?
One thing that struck me is how often that book, which is ostensibly about leadership and management, segues into religious claptrap. Same with most self-help books, even some of the better ones I've encountered. Of course, they don't call it "religious claptrap." They call it spirituality.*
Everyone, I am told, is spiritual.
No offense to people who are religious, but this one grates. Big time. Especially because "spirituality" outside of the context of New Age nonsense almost always means "Christianity, but we don't want to alienate Jews who might want to buy our book." In this case, there are direct references to "your church" and "reading scriptures," which is pretty specific to one religion that happens to be the dominant one in this part of the world. It's another way that non-Christians and non-theists are erased: "Oh, 'church' could mean 'synagogue' or 'mosque' too! Oh? You don't go to either of those? Well, walk through Nature-with-a-capital-N to renew your spirit. Everyone is spiritual."
Nope. I'm not. I'm completely grounded in the material world. I don't believe in a God, or gods, or fairies in the garden, and haven't since I was a wee child. That's cool if you do, but your assumption that my experience is just an exotic variation of your own is annoying as all fuck. I've never had any sort of religious experience, and it's pretty hard for me to comprehend how people can have religious experiences; I imagine the reverse is just as alien.
I've often been told–and it's generally meant as a compliment—"
sabotabby isn't religious, but she's one of the most spiritual people I've ever met." Which, yes, is also pretty offensive, and untrue. It makes me think that people just think that I'm lying when I tell them about my beliefs. I think maybe they mean "ethical," maybe, but again, the conflation of ethics with belief in the supernatural is problematic. I do the stuff that I do because I believe that there's no afterlife, no judgment, no punishment, and no reward. Because the here and now is all that matters. To suggest that I'm an activist because subconsciously I'm doing what someone's God wants me to do is to negate my agency as a human being.To be told that my spiritual wellbeing is an essential part of my fulfillment as a person is to tell me that I'll never be fulfilled as a human being. Fullstop. That's okay, I guess. I might be happier if I were religious, but then, I'd also be happier if I were a billionaire, but we live with our limitations. The problem is I don't think it's actually true. I suspect that religious people live with the same kind of gnawing doubts and empty spaces as atheists do, get just as terrified when their relatives die or when their bodies fail, are just as awful when they get into positions of power and responsibility, and so on. It would be like me suggesting that everyone should be politically involved; that if you're not out on the streets marching with signs, you're neglecting a vital part of your personhood. It's something that I'm into, a lot, but I don't think you're lying to yourself if you're not into it. You probably find it as boring as I find Nature-with-a-capital-N.
So that's my rant for the day. If you should happen to find the phrase, "everyone is spiritual in their own way" bubbling up in your head, clamp a lid on that baby and I'll be quiet about the opiate-of-the-masses thing.
* It's been awhile since my rant about how I respect religious fundamentalists more than cafeteria New Agers, but I'm sure I don't need to go into it again. Right?
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2012-07-28 02:17 am (UTC)No, I did not mean to imply anything as narrow as this. I'm not talking about experimental science, per se, or any particular philosophical tradition (I'm neither a rationalist nor an empirical materialist myself, for example). Well beyond the scientific community, a rough principle of transobservability forms the foundation of how we navigate the world in the most basic sense. Am I doing a good job at work? How is my health? What kind of car should I buy? Who should I vote for? Is this or that romantic partner "right" for me? Only in the broadest possible sense are these questions "scientific", yet fundamentally they all deal with information that (at least in principle) can be observed and evaluated by someone else.
However, barring cases where the input of my senses and memory is actually internally inconsistent or I have a particular reason to expect my perception to be altered/unreliable (eg I remember eating this Guatemalan suicide pepper, and then there was a coyote telling me to find my soul-mate), it seems like a reasonable starting point for me to provisionally accept my perception of the world as being a reasonably accurate reflection of an external reality that actually exists. If my perception and my "belief system" (ie my best current understanding of how the universe works) are in conflict, then both are subject to question.
I agree with this. I would simply include hearing voices, feeling the hand of God, seeing an angel, etc., in the same category as talking to a coyote, given that the altered states of consciousness capable of generating vivid hallucinations do not require an outside stimulus such as a hallucinogenic drug in order to occur. Granted such events are relatively uncommon outside of various meditative traditions and mental illness, but they are nevertheless infinitely more common than talking coyotes.
For what it's worth, while I fully accept that this may not challenge your conviction that taking delusion as the default assumption is the more rational approach, I would like to clarify that when I refer to evidence for a spiritual realm, I do mean something much broader than the "rays of light and an overwhelming sense that there's something more out there" spiritual experience thing. I'm including things like predictive power (if someone repeatedly tells you "God told me this (apparently up-to-chance) situation will play out thus-and-so" and it repeatedly turns out to be accurate, well, delusions are not generally known for being accurate predictors of real-world outcomes.
Sure. This would bridge the same gap that having Jesus/God in an interview room would. If someone could reproducibly read minds, engage in telepathic communication, predict the future, or any other thing not explainable given our understanding of physics and biology, and in a way that held up to repeated scrutiny, then our beliefs about the world would have to be substantially revised.
no subject
Date: 2012-07-28 07:09 pm (UTC)Also, Sabs, sorry for hijacking your post (uh, at least it's a week-old post...?) I'd have no problem just letting this drop if you'd prefer we don't have this discussion in your space.
So, that said, here goes.
I think that your examples of "transobservabiility forms the foundation of how we navigate the world" vary significantly in how effectively they support your position. "What kind of car should I buy?" for sure--that's generally very much based on objective factors like cost, fuel economy, trunk space, etc. "How is my health?" though, can be overwhelmingly determined by something like chronic pain or fatigue with no apparent cause. I can't observe, feel, or measure your pain; I am forced to choose whether to take your word for it (aided, perhaps, by observing that you behave like someone who is in pain) or decide that you are lying or deluded. I have a friend who spent decades being confidently assured by the medical establishment that she was just lazy and that chronic fatigue was a junk diagnosis, before fibromyalgia was widely recognized as a real condition. She had access to evidence that the doctors chose to dismiss as delusion because it wasn't transobservable and they couldn't link it to a physical cause. Similarly, the answer to "is this or that romantic partner right for me" can be to a significant extent determined by things like "how does it make me feel to be around this person?" While you could in principle map the neural activity and chemical changes that correlate to the feeling, the feeling is not transobservable. The feeling, in and of itself, is a piece of real, relevant evidence that is available only to the person experiencing it.
As for "I would simply include hearing voices, feeling the hand of God, seeing an angel, etc., in the same category as talking to a coyote", That's certainly a reasonable position to take. ;-) What about, say, attributing consciousness to the poorly understood, deeply interconnected, and mind-bendingly complex system that is the entire physical universe? Without tackling the question of whether it's true or not, would you be willing to grant that the fact of the universe having given rise to life and consciousness could rationally be taken as evidence that the universe as a whole might possess the characteristics of life and consciousness?
Oh, and just for the record, vivid hallucinations with no external stimulus being infinitely more common than talking coyotes is not actually established; that's pretty much the heart of what we're discussing, isn't it? Reports--from people with no (other) symptoms of mental illness, no history of drug use, etc.--of seeing angels or feeling the presence of God are widespread and persistent. Now, your starting assumption (and it's certainly a reasonable, defensible starting assumption) is that each of these reports is an example of a vivid hallucination, because you have already concluded that angels and God do not exist. Another possible, rational interpretation is that these reports constitute evidence (weak evidence, perhaps) for the existence of the beings being reported. It's entirely conceivable that some people imagine these things and some people genuinely witness them, in much the same way that some people have paranoid delusions of being persecuted by powerful agencies and some people genuinely are.
"This would bridge the same gap that having Jesus/God in an interview room would." I think we're in full agreement on this point.
no subject
Date: 2012-07-28 11:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-07-29 03:07 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-07-29 08:31 pm (UTC)What I would argue is that the feeling doesn’t need to be transobservable in order to convey justifiable belief. The “force” of gravity, for example, isn’t directly observable and yet we seem to believe in it, simply as a result of the preponderance and regularity of its effects. If the effects of prayer and the exertions of angels could be demonstrated with the same mundane regularity as gravity, which is (in principle) accessible to and reproducible by anyone, then I’m sure these things would be accepted without much controversy.
Oh, and just for the record, vivid hallucinations with no external stimulus being infinitely more common than talking coyotes is not actually established; that's pretty much the heart of what we're discussing, isn't it? Reports--from people with no (other) symptoms of mental illness, no history of drug use, etc.--of seeing angels or feeling the presence of God are widespread and persistent. Now, your starting assumption (and it's certainly a reasonable, defensible starting assumption) is that each of these reports is an example of a vivid hallucination, because you have already concluded that angels and God do not exist.
I wouldn’t say so. The key difference here is not one’s assumptions regarding the existence of God (one could be a very sober deist, for example, and regard ecstatic phenomena with the same skepticism that I do) but, again, the transobservability of the object. There is a qualitative difference between a mass hallucination and something that is transobservable; that is, a skeptic -- and in principle any skeptic -- has the same access to the phenomenon that a “true believer” does, and the phenomenon is (again, at least in principle) reproducible.
A few months ago I saw an interesting demonstration of this -- on Sam Harris’s blog, I’m embarrassed to say. A martial arts master claims to be able to use his “chi” to defeat opponents. He has a school devoted to this discipline, where hundreds of students learn to use “chi” energy in combat, and can be seen being floored by their teacher, who is apparently able to command this mysterious force with great regularity. At some point, the master of the school offers $5,000 to anyone who can beat him. An MMA fighter takes up the challenge. He not only beats him; the chi master’s “powers” are completely ineffective. No one is more shocked by this than the master. He stands on the mat literally dumbfounded that his opponent isn’t simply flopping to the ground like his students.
So here we have a case where there is a shared experience, and a shared belief, and it all seems to be above board. There are hundreds of students in the school; not all of them are mentally ill, presumably, although one could perhaps make the case that they were brainwashed. The whole thing might look pretty convincing -- up until the moment it becomes accessible to a skeptic.
no subject
Date: 2012-07-30 08:16 pm (UTC)Sure, there are lots of examples of people, individually and en masse, believing things that end up being firmly disproved. One of my personal favourite examples is the whole perpetual energy schtick. And yes, eyewitness accounts can certainly be outweighed by stronger, contradictory evidence, as in your example of the "chi master". Eyewitness accounts are not proof, but they are most assuredly evidence. If a generally truthful and reliable friend comes over to my house and comments that there was a black cat sitting at the end of my street when they walked by, I'll be inclined to believe that it's true even if I've never noticed a black cat on my street, and even if I go look and don't see one now (cats do come and go for reasons of their own, after all). If various friends and neighbors make comments about this black cat that I have never seen, then I'll be that much more likely to assume that it exists and I've just never happened to cross paths with it. Because my prior experience of the world indicates that there is such a thing as a black cat and that a residential street is a plausible place to find one, my starting assumption is that I have no reason not to believe these reports. If, on the other hand, this same parade of people commented that they had seen, say, a live hippogriff at the end of my street--well, in that case my initial assumption would be that they were hallucinating or being pranked. Why? Is a hippogriff that I've never seen somehow a more or less transobservable phenomenon than a black cat that I've never seen? Nope. But I know with pretty good confidence that black cats exist and hippogriffs don't. And yes, you're right, to be precise I should have said that you have already concluded that these particular phenomena (the perceptible presence of God, and visitation by visible angels) do not exist. The fact remains that the reason why you're assuming all accounts of angels, the hand of God, talking coyotes and so on are hallucinations is not because all unconfirmed eyewitness accounts of transient phenomena are assumed to be hallucinatory. If that were the case, then every account of a fog bank that burned off in the morning sun or a passing butterfly would similarly be dismissed as hallucination. No, these particular accounts are assumed to be hallucinatory because you have a prior belief that the things described are impossible or implausible--a belief which is, to the best of your understanding, supported by stronger evidence than that provided by eyewitness testimony to the contrary.