Calling all mystics

[drwex]

http://harpers.org/ThroughAGlassDarkly-12838838.html

Harper's has a long and thoughtful essay on the (re)rise of American Fundamentalism - what I've called our home-grown Taliban.

[The new Christ's] followers are not anxiously awaiting his return at the Rapture; he's here right now. They're not envious of the middle class; they are the middle class. They're not looking for a hero to lead them; they're building biblical households, every man endowed with 'headship' over his own family. They don't silence sex; they promise sacred sex to those who couple properly - orgasms more intense for young Christians who wait than those experienced by secular lovers.

I invite readers' comments. Personally I find this sort of things a natural outgrowth of mysticism in general. From where I sit it's a matter of degree, not kind, linking everyone from the newageist Pagans to... well, those guys.

I'm currently failing to find the link so I can properly acknowledge it, but last year someone pointed me to an essay by a person who, when asked why he didn't believe in God said, essentially:

"I don't not-believe in God - I just believe in one fewer gods than you do. If you can explain to me why you don't believe in any of those other gods I probably explain why I don't believe in yours."

Comments

To flip it around...

[shoutingboy.livejournal.com]

I think C.S. Lewis aptly points this argument the other way, though. To roughly paraphrase what he says in Mere Christianity, a Christian is free to believe that other religions are mostly right--a materialist has to believe that all religions are wrong.

Ask me for my opinions about Islam or Buddhism, and I can tell you a great many things I think they're right about. I think that makes me a bit more open-minded than, say, a Dawkins, who thinks teaching any religion to a child constitutes child abuse...

Re: To flip it around...

[dpolicar]

(nods) Yeah, I'm familiar with the argument, though I've never found it compelling.

(I should add, tangentially, that Mere Christianity was one of the first books that I actually found accessible back when I first started trying to wrap my brain around what you Christians are all about, so I do have a soft spot in my heart about it, despite not finding this argument compelling.)

My problem with it is that it's not entirely clear to me what "mostly" means in this sentence, or that it means anything useful.

I mean, you and Dawkins agree about a great many things too, it's just that none of those things have to do with Jesus Christ, intelligences intrinsic the nature of reality, or the ways in which living, not-yet-living, and once-living humans can interact usefully with those intelligences. So Dawkins can say that he's free to believe that you're mostly right about the way the world is, you're just wrong about God. It's not clear to me that this is a sensible thing for him to say, but it's not clear to me that it's meaningfully different from what Lewis is saying.

It seems to me that the question is not what percentage of your beliefs do you share (with a Dawkins or a Buddhist or a Wiccan or a militant agnostic or a liberal Democrat), or how many beliefs do you share, but how important are the shared and diverging beliefs to how you live your lives.

A materialist is free to consider his points of divergence with a Christian to not be very important, and thus conclude that they're mostly right and the points where they're wrong don't matter much. A Christian is free to do the same only if the divinity of Jesus Christ isn't very important to that Christian. In both cases, it seems to me that I'm being disengenuous... to the extent that one doesn't consider a basic tenet of Xism important, it seems misleading to the point of deception to describe one as an Xist.

Re: To flip it around...

[drwex]

I also think this trends back towards my main point, which is that once you open the door to theism you don't have a logical stopping point until you're well past the Taliban. If I wish to deny the mystic impulse (and to sympathize with Dawkins' overstatement) it's because I can see where it leads. Heck, we're LIVING in where it can lead.

Re: To flip it around...

[dpolicar]

Sure, and then one responds by pointing to nominally materialistic, atheistic nations like the former Soviet Union and highlighting how bad that was, and then you respond by explaining that their materialistic atheism wasn't sufficient or necessary to explain their badness, and they respond by explaining that the Taliban's mysticism isn't sufficient or necessary to explain their badness, and round and round we go.

Reasoning from "There exist people who believe X and do bad things related to that belief" to anything reliable about the badness of X is tricky.

Re: To flip it around...

[roozle.livejournal.com]

I think sunspiral, who is no friend of religion, once likened religion to Mrs PiggyWiggle's magic "EverSoMuchMoreSo" which makes people be themselves just MORE so. I find that the vast majority of people use religion to justify their own view of the world: the fearful person sees a fearsome, vengeful god; the generous person sees an open-handed god, and so forth. It brings out the great in human beings, and the terrible in them as well.

The statement that "once you open the door to theism you don't have a logical stopping point until you're well past the Taliban" begs the question that ANY belief, taken to extremes, can be twisted into a damaging form.

Re: To flip it around...

[dpolicar]

Re: the everSoMuchMoreSo notion... I think there's something to that, though I don't think it's quite true as stated.

I posted a take on something similar-but-different here; I point to it rather than attempt to restate it 'cuz I'm a lazy bugger.

(Rereading it now I'm struck both by how incredibly clumsily written it is, and by all the important related things I gloss over. It appears my thinking on this subject actually has improved somewhat in the last three years.)

Re: To flip it around...

[shoutingboy.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it's true that there's some slipperiness there. I think CSL's point was that almost all religions agree that there's something more than just what we see and touch, and that moral truths are in some sense transcendant and independant of us--and that materialism necessarily denies this. And because CSL (and I) think that that point-of-agreement-between-religions is very important, we tend to say "If you're religions, you agree with almost all other religions about a whole lot, and the materialists disagree with us about all the important stuff."

And certain kinds of materialists--like the Dawkinses--would tend to agree with us, and say, "Yes, you're right. All those religions tend to agree about really important stuff, and they're all dead wrong about it." Which is why Dawkins (and Harris and the like) feel like it's bad to try to draw distinctions between the mellow, moderate religions and the fanatical ones, since even the moderate ones are letting that transcendant camel's nose into the mundane tent.

But other materialists could very well say "No, actually, I think the important stuff is thus-and-so, and it turns out I do agree with this-and-that religion about those things, and disagree with other religions about it."

I guess I'd step back from what I said, and give a qualified agreement to your first point:

"If you can explain to me why you don't believe in any of those other gods I probably explain why I don't believe in yours."

And I'd say that if a religious believer (or anyone defending any position) uses arguments of type X, he should respect arguments of type X when they're made against him. If I say "I believe in Christianity because I trust and respect the people who taught it to me", he is obliged to respect similar arguments from a Hindu or atheist. If he says "I reject Islam because I feel like it has such-and-such a flaw", he should respect similar arguments against Christianity. If he says "I just know in my heart it's true", he has no argument against the person who says "I just know in my heart it ain't".

But if you're saying that every argument against Islam or Shintoism has an exactly parallel argument against Christianity, I think you're mistaken. And that seems to me to be the implication of your challenge/boast--you seem to be saying "any argument against religion X can be trivially transformed into an argument against religion Y." And I just don't think that's so. Different religions have different flaws. (To take one trivial example, I reject Mormonism because the religion is based on accounts of a civilization which has left no archaeological remnants whatsoever--no ruins, no coins, no pottery. Christianity may be hard to prove, but it's in much stronger shape than LDS--we can prove that those civilizations in Egypt and Mesopotamia that the Bible talks about really were there. So my argument against LDS can't be mapped into a corresponding argument against Christianity.)

Re: To flip it around...

[dpolicar]

(nods) Agreed with the thrust of your first few paragraphs.

That said, I'd like to clarify something here, before I potentially get the wrong idea: are you actually saying that you feel you have more ideological commonality with, say, someone who strongly identifies as an Orthodox Jew or Mormon or Wiccan than you do with, say, someone raised Greek Orthodox but who has no faith in an intelligent Deity concerned with human affairs in the first place? (It's fine with me either way, just want to be clear.)

But if you're saying that every argument against Islam or Shintoism has an exactly parallel argument against Christianity, I think you're mistaken.

Hm. I don't think I'm saying that. I can sorta see where you're getting it from, but I think it's just sloppiness on my part. That said, if you think the implication is central to what I'm saying, I invite you to stress it some more, as it may reveal a flaw in my reasoning that I'm glossing over. I certainly agree that to assert that would be a mistake for any reasonable reading of "exactly parallel argument".

And I'm going to let the whole issue of the existence of Egypt, etc, go without comment, since in and of itself it's tangential to the main point here, and I don't think you intended it to be a compelling argument for believing in Christianity.

I certainly am saying that, despite your Christianity and my lack of it, we share a common status as non-believers in approximately every religious tradition there is, ever was, or ever will be, and that [u]perhaps[/u] our common skepticism towards unfounded religious beliefs could usefully be considered more important than your faith in the one you consider true and I don't.

Re: To flip it around...

[shoutingboy.livejournal.com]

[drwex: I hope you don't mind us hijacking your journal? dpolicar linked here, and I followed.]

'That said, I'd like to clarify something here, before I potentially get the wrong idea: are you actually saying that you feel you have more ideological commonality with, say, someone who strongly identifies as an Orthodox Jew or Mormon or Wiccan than you do with, say, someone raised Greek Orthodox but who has no faith in an intelligent Deity concerned with human affairs in the first place?'

Yeah, I think I'd say that. Press me on specific cases, and I might back away from it. But overall, and by and large, and taking one thing with another, I think believers in a religious tradition[*] have something important in common with each other which we do not have in common with materialists.

'That said, if you think the implication is central to what I'm saying, I invite you to stress it some more, as it may reveal a flaw in my reasoning that I'm glossing over.'

I read you as saying, "Any person who disbelieves in religion X, and expresses that disbelief, has provided a corresponding argument against whatever religion he might hold". If that's not what you meant, then in what sense would you say that "If you can explain to me why you don't believe in any of those other gods I probably explain why I don't believe in yours"?

Though as it happens, my argument against Islam is one which you could trivially turn against Christianity. That is, my argument against Islam amounts to: "A. I am convinced of the truth of the core doctrines of Christianity, for other reasons; B. Islam disagrees with core doctrines of Christianity; therefore C. Islam is mistaken". You can trivially turn that into an argument against Christianity, by swapping nouns: You are convinced that there is no God, Christianity says there is a God, therefore Christianity is mistaken. In both cases, the argument naturally provokes the response, "Okay, what are those 'other reasons' you mentioned in premise A?"

Which is a fine and wholesome discussion to have, and I'm always happy to have it.

But that's why the Dawkinsish argument cited above--"You don't believe in Zeus, well, I don't believe in Christ"--doesn't really succeed against any actual religious believer. The Christian says "I don't believe in Zeus because I believe in Christ, and the teachings of Christ include the tenet that there is no other god."[**] So when Dawkins says, "Well, that's why I don't believe in Christ!", it's merely silly--the Christian says "What, you don't believe in Christ because you do believe in Christ?"

Which comes back to my biggest gripe about the current crop of ill-tempered atheist writers: They make a big show about how they're trying to engage with religious believers (right down to the title of Harris's book), but they're doing no such thing. They're preaching to the choir. They make arguments which would be utterly ineffective against the well-read theist, but which let ill-read materialists bask in the smug satisfaction of thinking their prejudices are proven by the laws of Logic and Science.

(It's a pity, really. I was a huge fan of Dawkins back in the day--I loved The Selfish Gene and The Blind Watchmaker. He was a very gifted writer of popular science, and that's an important job. But he's decided he'd rather spend his time as the cranky village atheist, and I can't see he accomplishes much for good or ill that way.)

[*] And "religious tradition" might let out Wiccans. Though many Wiccans I meet turn out to be pantheists who express themselves with neopagan terminology, and I'd definitely count pantheism as a "religious tradition" for these purposes.

[**] Though actually, that doesn't exclude the possibility of a very powerful being named Zeus--an angel or djinn or somesuch. Really, I'm agnostic on the question "is there a randy immortal living on top of Mt. Olympus". I just believe that if there is such a being, he's a creation of God, just like I am.

Re: To flip it around...

[drwex]

Hijack away. I wouldn't have left it open to posting if I hadn't been willing to accept a hijack.

That said, I agree with you that "believers in a religious tradition[*] have something important in common with each other which we do not have in common with materialists."

I'm reminded of an epigram here that I've heard said two ways:
"Reality bats last" (unknown) or
"Nature cannot be fooled" (Feynman)
Both of which are saying that at the end there's a material check on whatever you're up to. I'd suppose that a mystic would argue that God bats last.

Re: To flip it around...

[shoutingboy.livejournal.com]

I think we'd agree that reality bats last, we'd just say there's a lot more "reality" than materialists are aware of. If God is real, then, well, He's part of Reality. (In fact, He's most of it.)

Not all mystics argue that a god bats last

[gentlescholar.livejournal.com]

I beg to differ. I'm at least something of a mystic and I don't believe in any gods. I believe that there is something more than the mundane world, because I have directly perceived it on multiple occasions. But none of those perceptions involved detecting a consciousness or deity or what have you, and I try not to over-extrapolate from my tiny data set.

I'm fond of "reality bats last."

Re: Not all mystics argue that a god bats last

[dpolicar]

Related is "'Real' is what you cannot safely ignore," which I'm no doubt misquoting.

Re: To flip it around...

[dpolicar]

If that's not what you meant, then in what sense would you say that "If you can explain to me why you don't believe in any of those other gods I probably explain why I don't believe in yours"?

So, I invite you to reread the whole series of posts around that statement, above, but will quote the relevant section of my response:

I'm aesthetically fond of this approach... it's one of the few things I liked about Letter to a Christian Nation. Even the most devout believer in any monotheist faith has the experience of not believing in God in the face of the devout belief of others, because there's such a surplus of monotheist faiths, and ought to be able to empathize with that non-belief. That said, the counter to it is easy... and proceed to recapitulate what I think is your argument here as well.

I think you may be confusing some of the speakers in this exchange with one another, which is entirely understandable. If not, then I'm probably still missing a flaw in my thinking, though perhaps it would be better to move that discussion to my LJ?

Re: To flip it around...

[shoutingboy.livejournal.com]

'I certainly am saying that, despite your Christianity and my lack of it, we share a common status as non-believers in approximately every religious tradition there is, ever was, or ever will be, and that perhaps our common skepticism towards unfounded religious beliefs could usefully be considered more important than your faith in the one you consider true and I don't.'

The trouble there is, I don't see how this commonality of belief can amount to anything narrower than "I, like you, believe some statements are true and others are false". Which is something we do have in common, but it's something we have in common with everyone who ever lived. (Okay, some postmodernists would claim they don't believe it, but they're BSing us...)

Re: To flip it around...

[dpolicar]

Which is something we do have in common, but it's something we have in common with everyone who ever lived.

And this is bad why?

Re: To flip it around...

[dpolicar]

To expand on this a little... perhaps one of the important things I ought to say out loud is that what's important to me in discussions between the faithful and the faithless and all their various permutations is to find some way for them to live and work together productively in peace and fellowship.

Finding ways to convince one group or the other that they are wrong is interesting insofar as it might achieve that goal, but frankly I find it an unpromising direction.

That might help clarify the direction of a lot of my reasoning.

Every argument against Islam has an exactly parallel argument against Christianity

[gentlescholar.livejournal.com]

Actually, I think I would say that, depending on how nitpicky you want to be about "exactly parallel". I'm sure you can point out a spot where the Koran says factually false thing X and the Bible doesn't, for example. I expect there are places where the Bible says factually false thing Y and the Koran doesn't.

Maybe you can find an example where an exact parallel eludes me--I'm not a religious scholar. But I find it quite likely that somewhere some religious scholar could find that parallel, or something very close to it.

Thinking about this some more...

[dpolicar]

almost all religions agree that there's something more than just what we see and touch...

I believe this as well, as does everybody else I know.

But I expect you mean "see and touch" metaphorically, rather than literally... that is, I suspect that believing, say, in carbon monoxide or electrons or Pluto aren't examples of agreeing on what you and Lewis mean here.

Which is fine, and I'm not trying to spoof you here or anything... but it's a tricky metaphor to expand unambiguously. So we might agree on what you mean here. We might not. It's not clear to me which it is, or even how I'd go about determining which it is.

...and that moral truths are in some sense transcendant and independant of us

For any reasonable reading of "in some sense" I probably disagree with this, but I also don't consider it an important assertion. I suppose it might be true, and you're free to think that it is true and it really doesn't affect me at all.

(When you suggest that materialism necessarily denies these positions, I'm not sure what to say. Perhaps I'm not a materialist, which is OK with me. Perhaps I've misunderstood what you mean by these positions. Perhaps I'm asserting a hidden contradiction somewhere.

Elsewhere, when I asked you a question about someone "who has no faith in an intelligent Deity concerned with human affairs in the first place" you responded with an answer about "materialists"... so I assumed that the former was an interesting example of the latter.

In thinking about it now I suspect we don't actually share an understanding of what "materialist" refers to in more than a vague, handwavy way.)

However, there's a series of unspoken, related assertions that I think are important, such as:
* "...and that humans can become aware of these transcendent, independent moral truths..."
* "...and that the doctrines of my religious tradition captures these moral truths more closely than other doctrines."

I reject those assertions, both with regards to my own religious tradition, and also with regards to yours.

If you reject, or are neutral with respect to, those assertions -- that is, if you merely assert that there exist transcendent, independent moral truths but do not assert that you have more accurate beliefs about what they are than (for example) I do, and do not assert that Christians as a class have more accurate beliefs about what they are than (for example) Mormons do -- then I'm inclined (with respect to what we've said so far) to say you and I agree on the important stuff.

If you assert those assertions, then we disagree on something important (and you and a Mormon probably disagree on the same important thing as applied to Christianity, although the Mormon might believe something parallel but importantly different about Mormonism).

Only tangentially related to the above: are you actually saying that you don't consider beliefs about Christ to fall into the category of "important stuff" as defined here? Or are you saying that somehow you share those beliefs with an Orthodox Jew?

Re: To flip it around...

[thatwesguy.livejournal.com]

A preamble:

To expand on this a little... perhaps one of the important things I ought to say out loud is that what's important to me in discussions between the faithful and the faithless and all their various permutations is to find some way for them to live and work together productively in peace and fellowship.

Finding ways to convince one group or the other that they are wrong is interesting insofar as it might achieve that goal, but frankly I find it an unpromising direction.

This too, is my underlying bent. Onward:

Yeah, it's true that there's some slipperiness there. I think CSL's point was that almost all religions agree that there's something more than just what we see and touch, and that moral truths are in some sense transcendant and independant of us--and that materialism necessarily denies this.

I disbelieve the assertion attributed here to CSL, and would like to try to convince you that it has clear potential both to be incorrect, and also to be harmful to the goal of "all of us just getting along."

My understanding is that materialism "holds that the only thing that can truly be said to exist is matter; that fundamentally, all things are composed of material and all phenomena are the result of material interactions." (wikipedia) I will adopt this position for this post (and in fact it is consonant with my actual beliefs).

I believe that thought exists. However, I also hold that only that only matter exists. I do not believe that thought is composed of matter. Is my belief system self-contradictory?

Well, let's say that I believe that humans are made exclusively of matter. Let's say that I believe that physical neurons embody an abstractable system. Already I skirt with trouble: abstractable implies that something immaterial can exist. Okay, then let's back out a level:

Can a materialist accept that the number "2" exists?

I certainly hope that the answer is yes, but the definitions we've accepted so far say otherwise.

Oh dear. I'm in trouble before I've even finished warming up.

Let's assume for the moment that someone rescues me and allows me to accept the existence of "2" without giving up my "materialist" membership card.

...Perhaps I don't even need to finish this argument to give you the flavor of my belief that complexity and abstraction alone are sufficient to give the materialist access both to belief in "more than we can see and touch" and to belief in "moral truths (that are) independent of us."

But I'm happy to if you think it necessary.