I am sympathetic to faith in God

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

I hope this is not moved to the theology forum because this piece is about human psychology (with overtones of tolerance) and is not any sort of argument about God itself.

I am an atheist and an unusually un-conflicted one. I am, however, somewhat sympathetic to other people's (sincere) belief in God--not because I think it might be true, but because I can readily understand how a good and smart person can be utterly convinced without following a degenerate line of argument... without any deduction or even much analysis.

In Greg Bear's novel DARWIN'S RADIO (or its sequel) a scientist awakes one morning, goes outside and has a transcendent experience. She feels unity with all of the world, and all of the world unified with something utterly benign with a personality and an awareness of her existence.

For a few minutes she feels freedom from the existential anxieties that beset us so continually that we are not even aware of their immense weight. She is free of a sense of alienation she didn't know she had.

And then the feeling fades. And every minute of life is informed by the loss. Every day there are doubts but also anticipation... will it ever return? (It is a magnificent description of unbidden faith sufficient to move this atheist deeply and clearly Bear's attempt to record something personal because that sub-plot is largely redundant to the story.)

I can (and do) dismiss the feeling as an artifact of human psychology but if the feeling includes in itself a perfect sense of validity it can be almost infinitely persuasive. I have never felt it so I cannot say for sure how rational I would remain in the face of it.

Such transcendent experience can be universal in character, yet manifest itself differently in religion. If you get the feeling you will probably interpret it in terms of the religious traditions of your community. Thus the same experience may make you a devout Muslim, a devout Christian, a devout animist, etc.. From observing religions in practice it seems possible that most of the 'faithful' have never had the experience and from reading a variety of points of view it seems that some who experience it remain non-believers. (Though perhaps likelier to be agnostic?)

Atheists raised Catholic will get this right away. Catholics almost fetishize wrestling with faith. Among the priestly class it sometimes becomes an intensely intellectual struggle. If you confess to a priest that you have lost your faith he will understand because he probably has also... many times. (The alcoholic de-frocked priest raging at an absentee God to return is a stock literary character for a reason.)

Faith is something you strive for an often do not have. You felt it. It was a constant companion. Then it was gone and the world became a vastly more hostile place. The person who has lost faith is probably likelier to be praying in church because she is desperate to regain something transient that felt wonderful. (Don't it always seem to go that you don't what you've lost till it's gone...)

From Mother Teressa's writings it seems that she had faith as a young woman and then lost it and never got it back. Her famous (debatably) good works were driven by a desire to regain what was lost. And it seems likely that she died without ever regaining it.

Looking at the origin of faith in this way is one thing that makes me less hostile and frustrated with sincere believers. To seek something you lost that was the best thing you ever had and that you are embarrassed to even admit you lost is more tragic than contemptible.

(Needless to say, the extreme of mistreating people in your efforts to convince God to return to you are indefensible. To be good and ethical people we all repress some desires for things we desperately want and wanting God is not different.)

[Warren Stupidity]

1. I am sympathetic to the belief in Santa Claus

I refrain from deflating the joy small children take in this myth. On the other hand I find it most peculiar for adults to also profess such ideas.

As an atheist I am not removed from transcendental experiences. I can find those experiences, and do, all without having a mythical being belief.

[NNN0LHI]

19. Santi is not for real?

:cry:

[Newest Reality]

2. I agree with your symapthies, and for several reasons ...

What is interesting is how we are so compelled to sacrifice and sublimate the subjective for the sake of the objective and collective when it comes to truth. It is a matter of context. Personal experience is true for a person and in a sense, only what one knows or knows to be true is real for them.

What seems difficult is to consider the validity of subjective, personal experience while still maintaining the objective. In many respects, conceptual reality is often defined by a collective agreement that can be, and is often, not conducive with the individual. When kept in perspective the subjective experience and nature of an individual is one thing and the objective nature of the collective of the group is another. Once that is clear and their nature is understood then declaring one more true or real than the other is a matter of context in relation to consensus.

In other words, freedom in a broader sense, depends on some basis like that in order to prevent denigrating the personal and subjective and eventually limiting and defeating it with various degrees of impersonal group mind in various forms from local to Global.

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

5. What makes the objectivity question tricky is that he have specific psychological experiences

One of my deep philosophical experiences was the first time I got an optical migraine. Suddenly I could not read with one eye. Scary! Then I stated seeing neat tiny bars of colored light in a particular unmoving, un-flickering pattern.

With my good eye I hit Google and was soon looking at diagrams telling me exactly what this hallucination would like like in five minutes, in ten minutes, etc..

And it was accurate. My experience was typical and common.

That got me thinking... a certain percentage of the population will have this very specific hallucination at some point in life (due to a spasm in a blood vessel in a particular part of the brain)

Let's say I took a group of children and indoctrinated them as to the appearance of God as being radial tiny neon tubes of strong simple colors. When, years later, one of my students had this very specific experience how could she then doubt that she had seen God?

The going into the light of near-death experiences seems similar. Describe heaven in terms of this seemingly universal, yet surprising, brain effect and near-death experiencers will have little doubt that they have seen heaven.

And this brings me to the transcendent experience I described. If you experience it maybe you are crazy. But you meet someone else who is able to describe your experience with great exactitude. And another. And another. At some point it becomes hard not to believe! Dozens of people know all about your most personal experience -- one you may have never shared with anyone before.

If religious experience is particular enough to many humans then the origins of religion become less surprising.

[RandomThoughts]

3. Interesting. thoughts.

Losing faith? That is an interesting concept, and that feeling you speak of.

It is easy to walk in and out of, it is like being on the roof. you can step in and out of 'that feeling' any time, and step back into it, in my experience. I find it better to stay on the roof, but do step out at some times for some reasons.

Depends what you think on, and how you feel from moment to moment. As far as loosing faith, you could argue the form of God, their are many that make arguments on that, but the atheist views of no God is really not possible for me with things I have experienced. Although I harbor no ill will to people that have different beliefs, or even the ideas of no belief.

I hope you find the best way to be happy in the ways you find to be your way, and it is nice to hear thoughts on the topic from many perspectives. You make a point I had not thought of, something to think on, people searching to return to that feeling and spending much time in prayer or at church. Not sure about that, although it might be true for some.

I do not have experience with having to search for that feeling so not sure about that. Although I do like to find other pieces and how they are in the same type of what I think of as better spirits of kindness and love.

But interesting post. It is also possible that if a person is doing good, they are allowed to live without that feeling as a faith one, but as a feeling when they share love and other good things in the same way, then faith can come at some later point. lots of thoughts on that.

But interesting thoughts there :hug:


I really love this thought when thinking on that thought. I sort of found faith more like the guy in the story of this song, more then by other ways, although I did have to feel with heart.

One of my favorite songs,
Dixie Chicks - Travelin' Soldier.
http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoID=693200323

Although it depends how you see it :loveya:

[Oregone]

4. I'm concerned with the majority of a population engaging in irrational behavior (public servants too...

Believing in that which cannot be proven (faith) is quite irrational, unless you can first justify it by already believing in religious tenants that glorify this pattern of human thinking. Having public servants practice affixing beliefs without evidence only makes their minds susceptible to further gullibility. This type of thinking has real world manifestations that we deal with daily

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

6. The manipulation of hunger is a long-standing political malignancy

but I do not blame the hungry for it.

People do and think terrible things in the name of faith and if it is a standard (though not universal) human psychological experience that makes it that much more subject to cruel manipulation.

I am strident on the ill effects of religion and religious thinking but am often sympathetic on a personal level to people of seemingly sincere and benign faith.

It doesn't necessarily mean they are stupid or crazy. (Though they may well be both.)

[Oregone]

7. Thats not what I'm getting at

"People do and think terrible things in the name of faith and if it is a standard"

I think you missed where I'm going....

People who actively believe without evidence that there is an invisible best friend in the sky protecting them engage in an irrational pattern of thought that repudiates the scientific process. If you can believe strongly in such a way, and do so often enough, is it that much of a stretch to believe that a country has weapons of mass destruction? Is it that much of a stretch to believe that an entire country of people want to bomb your children, and will probably do so tomorrow? Is it that much of a stretch to believe a black man with a Kenyan father is a Manchurian candidate who needs to be eliminated?

If you do believe strongly, actively, and often in the supernatural, then belief in mundane distortions are not quite a leap. Practicing this line of irrational behavior will only lead to more of it (my premise...which is testable).

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

9. You and I both have irrational mental processes

Hence the construction of a system outside ourselves to use as a touch-stone of objectivity. (Like the history of natural observation of things you and I can both see and descibe similarly and hypothesis tested by reproducible experiment.)

Part of not believing in the soul (I am assuming we both reject the soul) is recognizing that a few pounds of wet-ware is doing all of this and that our wet-ware didn't evolve to be scientific.

Faith arising from a hard-wired psychological event is not grossly anti-scientific. It is, after all, subjectively an observation of the world, not merely a thought. It requires a lot of sophistication and discipline and intrinsic, non-universal personality traits to counter such a thing.

"Belief" absorbed in order to fit into society, justify social position, etc.. is grossly anti-scientific.

The point of the OP is that if one trait of a psychological manifestation is seeming verisimilitude then it becomes a much trickier thing.

I would probably read such an experience as a psychological manifestation. That's me.

But if someone who lacks my background as a stone-atheist with a hobby of studying human perceptual and reasoning defects and anomalies has a different reaction it is wrong for me to assume weak-mindedness.

As with all psychological effects, however, what one does with them is a measure of the person.

[Oregone]

10. Yes...I just have less

I'm also a vegetarian that eats like crap sometimes...but at least I don't wash it down with a steak. Ya know what I mean.

And by saying "I have less"...Im comparing myself to a hypothetical me that totes his bible around (yeah...I used to do that)


"Faith arising from a hard-wired psychological event is not grossly anti-scientific"

Believing, without evidence, in an unprovable idea is anti-scientific by definition, no matter how natural it may be (and normally this sort of belief necessitates believing the alternative is impossible).


"As with all psychological effects, however, what one does with them is a measure of the person."

True enough

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

11. What I meant was that experience is evidence

A scientist credits his reading of a dial. If ten other people read it differently he will accept that his eyes are bad, but even our most rational thoughts are derived from experience in some way.

So my point is merely that to experience God is a more scientific basis for belief than to simply credit what someone tells you about God.

You and I would agree that the experience of God is a brain-effect not an actual experience of God. But because it is personal experience folks who get it will give it great weight. (If we didn't give experience weight as presumptively real we could hardly function.)

You and I can counter experience. An optical illusion asks which line is longer. We see one thing and measure another thing. We credit the measurement.

But a person who looks and says line X is longer is not a fool. We rely on experience until proven otherwise.

Thus I am sympathetic to believers who come to faith from personal, albeit erroneous IMO, experience. I know that without a sufficient alternative explanation I might do the same thing. And few people have internalized the sufficient alternative explanation.

If the two-lines optical illusion was not advertised as an illusion we wouldn't measure it to learn we are wrong. 99% of the time the line that looks longer is, in fact, longer and we all operate on that basis in day-to-day life.

To you and me, experiencing God would be counter to expectations. We would see the experience like the optical illusion... here's a weird thing that is probably wrong so one ought to measure it using the most objective available criteria.

But for most people the "illusion" label isn't there.

So they can be wrong, but not dramatically flawed by general human standards.

And again, this only applies to people who believe that they have actually experienced God in a way that seemed as compelling as all other conscious experience. I do not think all those who identify themselves as believers have.

[ismnotwasm]

8. Faith in deities is very powerful

And seemingly universal. So, I always assume it had/has some sort of evolutionary benefit, if not always a clear societal one. Faith needs no proof, no reason, no explanation---which is one reason why it's so irritating when those of faith shove religion or religious interpretation at folks. It seems contradictory to what I understand faith to be. When faith along with religious teachings were used to explain the world around us for lack of any other explanation, that was one thing. To currently use old mythology to explain what's going around us is another. To me, doing so spoils the beauty and wonder of things, although if I was a person of faith, I would marvel at science as much as I do without it.


Anyhow, it's a case of That was then, This is now.

To be fair, it's my experience with the religious people around me that they don't try to shove anything. They have faith and are satisfied.

It's those others, who want it in our government, who want it in our schools, who want to mandate this or that on the basis of religious well, dogma, really that make me want to scream.

[anthroguy101]

12. Yeah, here's the thing.

If my car breaks down in the middle of the road, no matter how hard I try, no amount of prayer is going to fix the car. The only thing that can fix the vehicle is a person. If I depend on prayer or a supernatural force to fix a broken car in the middle of the desert, I am not going anywhere and would dehydrate.

[Marr]

13. I think I understand your point.

I do think it's unfortunate that our whole vocabulary for discussing this kind of phenomenon is religious. I had a similar experience myself once. I was raised without any religion and remain atheist, but one morning I had a very profound sensation of... connectedness or something. I don't think it was supernatural in any way, but it was a very warm, soothing moment, and I'd be very interested to know what was going on in my brain.

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

15. I think WIlliam James' The Varieties of Religious Experience deals with such

in an attempt to step outside existing religious frames. I have read such periods of transcendence referred to as "James-ian experiences"

[surrealAmerican]

18. The thing about that feeling of "connectedness" is, that ...

... although it feels great for a short time, if you had to live with it as a permanent condition, it would become a crushing burden.

A lack of faith can be a liberating feeling as well.

[Bluenorthwest]

14. A book recommendation

A lovely short novel, Lying Awake, by Mark Salzman. An afternoon's read, and this OP makes me think you would enjoy it very much. Well written and directly connected to your post, in several ways.

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

16. Thanks!

[Echo In Light]

17. Error: you can only recommend threads which were started in the past 24 hours