path_of_one
Embracing the Mystery
Carrying on from what CZ said (post 31)... I do not speak as an authority, just as myself, with my opinions. It goes without saying that I have some biasses, philosophical ones, ( I am completely straight). I am interested in the psychology that drives people to religious belief, the practice of its rituals and its effects across societies. I do not look at religion through the same lens as you and where as you tend to focus on unifying principles I tend to see where it is used as an excuse for things that are wrong, or could be better.
Actually, though I may see unifying principles, I don't believe I have ever avoided seeing it also as an excuse for things that are wrong. I put government/politics in the same category. I think I am fairly ruthless in seeing how power and economic struggles, the fear and greed of the ego, are pretty much universal in their corruption of the good ideas people have... only exacerbated by state-level society and all its trappings. I'm not necessarily a proponent of religion, but neither will I ignore blatant evidence that religious systems have formed the foundation of some useful stuff socially, medically, ecologically. I see the bad and the good and try to acknowledge both, try to detangle myself from the stuff that causes suffering and embrace the stuff that spreads joy and peace. What I try to avoid, particularly because I do professionally study this stuff, is skewing my bias so far toward the "religion is rosy" or the "religion is a bunch of dangerous BS" view that I lose sight of what religion's functions may actually be and how it might actually function, both individually in the human mind (given personality difference and so forth) and collectively in broader cultures.
Quite frankly, if I didn't bother to attempt the balancing act, I'd be lousy as a social scientist, because I'd either put myself in a superior position to my "subjects" (a big no-no for both scientific and ethical reasons) or I'd be taken in by any and all systems without any capacity to compare them, note similarities and differences, and tie them in to larger cultural trends.
I think many mistake my own sense of spirituality for a wholesale acceptance of religion without criticism, which is not how I function in the least. I am a critic of most of modern society, to be honest, and my own sense of the usefulness of belief systems for myself do not prevent me from seeing the dangers that religious systems pose socially.
Balance. This is what I seek and what I also philosophically believe makes for a good point of reference for analyzing social and cognitive data. In many ways, it is balance between the emic and etic views in anthropology. It is seeking, as much as possible, the understanding of the insider (and hence the believer) while trying to analyze historical process, social integration, etc. from the understanding of the outsider (the skeptic and critic).
I question my own worldview and religious systems in general all the time, but there is a difference between questioning accuracy and throwing everything out without regard for usefulness.
I have a great respect for your effort on this forum. You have given me some of the toughest intellectual challenges I have faced here and enriched my understanding of some current thinking in the world of anthropology. You are one of my favourite reads here. But I could no more be you than you could be me.
Aw, thanks. And of course you can't be me, and I can't be you. That's life. What I am criticizing in this thread is not that people may not have the same beliefs- that is natural and to be expected. What I criticize is from the post-modern perspective, which notes the inherent biases of the supposed "objective" scientific point of view, and demonstrates that these, too, are culturally conditioned views and cloud our understanding of reality. What I criticize is the Western atheist or scientific tendency to devalue and often even mock other cultural ways of knowing and understanding our world, which are often hundreds or even thousands of years older, and have proven themselves through the greatest social experiment of all- long-term survival. This is an experiment that modern capitalist materialist culture has not yet completed, and so far we are failing miserably in sustainability, peace-building, and meeting basic needs for everyone. So I do have respect for the worldviews and cultures of those peoples who endured for much longer than my own culture, and I think they have something to offer. It is this respect that I push for in broader society and, yes, expect from all people whatever their beliefs. I am a proponent of respect for others, of openness to learning from all peoples and all cultures, and as much as some people may resist this their entire lives, I cannot do otherwise than promote it.
So please do not think I do not understand... really I do as much as I am able, but I have had my own university of life and give dialogue based on that. I think you underplay the basic psychological motives for belief, because belief is important to you. They are a tad uncomfortable when reduced to that after all.
LOL, Tao... I'll send you some copies of the articles and books when they're complete if you'd like. To be honest, I am the last person to underplay psych motives- my own focus is, after all, cognition and I've spent years pondering how the human mind constructs our world. But this is a forum for interfaith dialogue, not a forum on anthropology or cognitive studies. I come here to discuss my spirituality, and while sometimes my views on religion as a cultural phenomena come into play, I am mostly here to talk about my spiritual life, because that is the type of venue it is. Likewise, when I'm on a panel discussing cognition or sustainability or what have you, I don't find it compelling to discuss my feelings about God, conversations with trees, or life as a Druid. Studying religion is not the same thing as having a spiritual life for me. I have a life of my spirit and a life of my intellect, and the two overlap but they are not interchangeable.
The difference between you and I, so far as I can tell, is that you have determined that the psychological or cognitive underpinnings of the human mind drive an illusory reality that we can escape through materialism or objectivism. I have determined that these underpinnings drive an illusory reality that we will never escape, nor are we meant to, and it would not necessarily be useful. Materialism and objectivism are themselves just one more type of illusory reality that we fall into; we exchange one worldview for another, but we will always have a worldview. It is what makes us human. So rather than be alarmed at these worldviews, I study them with fascination, including my own... and enjoy the ride. I am far more interested in how worldviews contribute (or not) to sustainability, to peace, to happiness, to cultural longevity, than I am in proving the accuracy or superiority of one or another. I have no illusions that I can escape the world my mind creates, nor do I want to. What I wish is for the capacity to understand as many views as possible and to study their causes and effects, their integration with other cultural attributes, their capacity (or lack thereof) for enabling long-term social survival and environmental sustainability.
It is fairly irrefutable that modern materialist capitalism as a worldview destroys human happiness on a broad scale and also contributes to rapid environmental degradation.
So... I'm interested in what I can learn from other worldviews for a better way.
Sometimes my deepest criticisms are my simplest. And here it is almost as though the most objection comes from my simplest observations. People are more forgiving of long winded statements that can be dissected and obufusicated till the point is long forgotten.
I suppose I am just used to long statements, to dissecting and criticizing them. I rarely forget the point of what I am doing. I guess it's because this is what I do. Science is not done in soundbites, and most people I know who are scientists do not find the soundbite approach accurate or useful. It breeds misunderstanding and miscommunication by relying on too many assumptions. My brain naturally works to be as descriptive as possible, and this was refined through my methodological training. My statements here are attempts to summarize mountains of descriptions- from myself, from hundreds of varied cultural accounts I've read, from hundreds of conversations with others I have had, and thousands of observations. Even in my personal discussions about my own life, set up as summaries (as you see here, believe it or not- I have thousands of pages of notes, journals, partial manuscripts, etc.), I try for some sort of clear description and discussion. This requires more than a soundbite for me. It makes me easier to "nail," but that is as it should be. That is why we do not publish soundbites in science. You want to be nailed as a scientist. This is how you grow and learn.
This basic principle resonates with me and so I also use it in my spiritual life. I want to be challenged. I defend as a matter of course, because that is how I refine my thoughts and work through the experience of my life. I hope you understand that my criticisms of you are never with the aim of silencing, but rather with the aim of clarifying my own thoughts. Defense in debate is an opportunity to evaluate one's original description of data (whether it is experiential, observational, experimental) and one's analysis.
The kind of diffuse metaphysics you believe in is not alien to me. I was just leaving that kind of space when I first arrived on CR. But I did not leave it behind just to give integrity to my atheism. I left it because the models I had used to support it were found to be insubstantial wishfull thinking. Pretty, comforting and self-empowering too I agree, but without foundation none the less.
Again, I think you are more interested in the accuracy of your worldview (which I believe to be impossible, given the way human cognition works). I am more interested in usefulness.
I make no claims that my worldview is accurate. That isn't the point. Maybe trees can have conversations, and maybe they cannot. What I can know is that my experience that trees converse with me makes me happy and gives me a sense of connection to them. My worldview that trees are sentient means I don't use more wood and paper than I need, that I promote forest conservation, that I respect them as having a right to live not only as resources, but as beings. And this worldview, which is rather traditional to many animist societies, supported long-term social survival without deforestation for thousands of years in many locations. Whereas modern science-driven recycling and "save the rainforest" campaigns largely fail in the face of human greed and indifference toward anything beyond the immediate social circle. By making trees part of the felt, experienced social circle, this cognitive barrier in human decision-making trade-offs is thwarted.
I could care less if the sentience of trees is correct. There is no doubt, given the literature, of its usefulness.
I am a social scientist. I work on problems of sustainability and suffering. What I care about is the useful value of something toward these ends. And so far, my studies of human cognition make me deeply cynical about any capacity for a human being to ever have an accurate perception of reality for many reasons, which I suppose I could elucidate if you wish. So while you are skeptical of the value of belief systems in general, I am skeptical that any human can escape belief systems at all, and if they could, if they could then function socially, make decisions, and do other usual human behaviors. So far, evidence would indicate not. Our amazing capacity for sociality and rapid decision-making relies on a ton of learned pathways (that are then confirmed neurologically) that channel information in certain ways so we can weed through far more data than our brain is capable of analyzing and so we can rapidly make decisions all day with little cost. So, we can't leave it behind, and the question to me becomes what pathways contribute to long-term survival and happiness of our species.
Sometimes the reduction to fundamentals is threatening, it can make people feel stupid to have a glaring impossibility in their cherished belief pointed out to them in a few simple words. But sometimes the charge 'you oversimplify' is a false one. Sometimes the truth is easy to grasp.
Reductionism almost uniformly is considered poor science, because it simply doesn't work, especially with understanding emergent phenomena. I'm not against reductionism because I find it threatening, but because I don't find it useful or accurate as a methodology.
And I don't think anyone really grasps the truth. I think that's just one more illusion.
Personally, I am not much concerned with THE TRUTH. I don't need to know or understand everything; I am content to work on actual problems that could have real solutions. In spirituality, I am not after answers, but after becoming a more loving and joyful person, a calm and peaceful person. Whether it is my mind talking to my mind when I sit with the trees, or the trees talking to me, the results are the same. What I refuse to do is to assume that any individual's assessment of their own experience is without merit. When you say "my mind is talking to my own mind," that is fine with me. And what I ask for is that when I say "I experience the trees talking to me," you leave the door open that perhaps your own experience and even the state of Western science in this moment, is not the culmination of human understanding of truth... that there is a possibility that others might have something you (and science) does not. I realize, you may not be able to do this. But the reason I fight for this openness is because it is closed-mindedness and superiority that has often led to mistreatment and dismissal of indigenous peoples' cultures and worldviews all over the world-- cultures that proved themselves through long-term survival. And in the meantime, we do more damage than anyone has ever done.