50 blogs on disbeleif - Wonder

50 Blogs on Disbelief
My thoughts on the book, 50 Voices of Disbelief, Why We Are Athiests, edited by Russell Blackford and Udo Schuklenk. Written as I read them in no particular order. The page number of the essay is provided at the top of each entry.
p. 28 J. L. Schellenberg “Why I am a Nonbeliever? – I Wonder…”

I would recommend this book for this essay alone.

You can buy this article individually here. 50 Voices - I Wonder

I haven’t found any free articles by this author, but there are plenty of reviews that might give you a sense of what he has to say. I will keep looking and attempt to summarize it. I don’t know if I can do it justice.

“Plato says that philosophy begins in wonder.”

So begins this essay, rather innocently telling the story of his very religious upbringing in rural Manitoba. He felt the wonder of the world through the lens of Christianity. Through post secondary education he discovered,

“The New Testament was a decidedly human construction, a shining record of personal liberation in places, but also pockmarked with all the prejudices and proselytizing aims of it authors,…”

He goes on to tell about his discovery of Buddhist and Taoist wisdom as well as others. He spent time in the library and discovering new people on the streets of the city. He knew he had learned humility, honesty and commitment from his Christian upbringing and he struggled to integrate this with his new found knowledge. As he says,

“It hurts to have your neat picture of the world torn to shreds; your emotions left jangling. But no one said that a commitment to live in wonder, straining for real insight and understanding, comes without cost.”

His new views of the world brought the problem of evil and hiddenness argument for atheism into focus. At the time he was asking these questions the term “hiddenness argument” hadn’t been coined. Up to this point, this seemed like just another essay. It seemed he was going to miss the point about the value of his upbringing and how it led to his later insight, but he did give it a nod. Then he started talking about his recent thoughts and said,

“And through yet another strange twist that I am still in the midst of navigating, it appears that in the depths of evolutionary religious skepticism can be found the seeds of new life for religion.”

I had to read that a couple times, “evolutionary” what? To clarify it, he first covers some basic science. Scientists pretty well agree that the earth will be around for another billion years. Let’s put that into perspective.

Earliest human ancestor walking upright 6,000,000 million years ago
Homo Erectus (walking upright) humans 2,000,000 million years ago
Homo Sapiens Sapiens (that’s us) about 130,000 years ago
Oldest beads 80,000 years ago
Cave painting 30,000 years ago – that is, scribbling on a wall
Human agriculture 10,000 years ago
Pyramids built 4,780 year ago

Years remaining that we can continue to create a better world
1,000,000,000

30,000 years to get from scratching on a wall to watching Avatar in the palm of your hand. What could we do in 30,000 more years? How about 30,000 times 30,000 years?

Getting back to the essay, he says, “Apply this now to religion.” Although we have dominated and altered the planet, our maturity is still questionable and our propensity to violence hard to excuse. Those cave paintings are evidence that we humans started thinking about something beyond our own existence long before we could preserve those thoughts in writing and at a time that violence was the solution to most of our problems.

Given that we have created not only language but ways of communicating across language barriers, including instant communication around the globe, we can not only think about how we might evolve, we can affect the course of our evolution, setting a pace of evolution faster than previous generations.

He says all of this better than I ever could. I have added a few of his books to my reading list

Prolegomena to a Philosophy of Religion 2005
Available in Google books
Divine hiddenness and human reason 2006
The Wisdom to Doubt: A Justification of Religious Skepticisim 2007
The Will to Imagine: A Justification of Skeptical Religion 2009

See Review Review of Will to Imagine

I will try to find some more of his works.
Next

Truth - Consciousness - Bliss

Okay, it’s still summertime, and I’ve been doing too much of either watching You Tube, or enjoying the last of the warm weather. I did listen to an interview by Bill Moyers of Joseph Campbell. If you were around in the 80’s, there is a good chance you have heard of Campbell. He saw a totem pole when he was young and it sparked a lifelong fascination for the study of myths. That passion culminated in a six part PBS series. Or, if you saw the movie Star Wars, his influence on George Lucas helped make that movie what it was.

There is a lot I could go in to here, but one of his central tenets answered a question for me that I have been working on for a long, long time. The question is, how do I know if something that I feel is right, is coming from my heart or from somewhere more base? Put another way, is it just a physical desire, or something my subconscious senses as a valuable course of action. In religious terms, is it God or the Devil speaking to me?

I can remember discussing it in my college dormitory. I felt I knew how to discern my inner voices, until a guy, who happened to be a raging alcoholic, someone who was very good at following his baser instincts, asked me to describe how I would know. It was more of a challenge really than a question. I couldn’t answer him. Now I could.

Joseph Campbell calls it following your bliss. He came to his understanding while studying Sanskrit. Sanskrit is an ancient language with some of the greatest spiritual writing the world has known. It has been absorbed in to Hinduism and other Eastern practices. When you hear of someone with the title of Sri or Yogi, that is someone who studies and teaches these ancient writings.

A central god of this tradition is Brahman. He has no characteristics, no form. One way to describe him is sachchidananda (I have seen more than one spelling of this). This word has three parts:

1) Sat – Truth or Being
2) Chid – Ultimate Consciousness
3) Ananda – Bliss, delight

As Campbell puts it, how do you know if you know the full truth or have reached the full potential of your being, you don’t. How do you know if you are fully conscious, you don’t. How do you know what excites you, what drives you, well that you do know, and it will lead you to the other two.

This still does leave some questions open as to what is just for pleasure, but in the interview, this came up within the context of laws. One of the functions of myth is to codify what a culture believes is right and how its people should act. This almost always causes trouble because laws need to change with the new challenges that each generation faces. But I don’t want to get too far off on that tangent.

The importance of grouping these three is that you can know if you are making good choices in one area, because you will see progress in the other two. Let’s say you like baseball. If you sit on the couch and watch baseball all day, you probably will not find any insight to higher truth or feel that your consciousness is expanding. If however you dedicate yourself to improving your baseball skills or competing at a high level, you might.

It may take a little time, but I think this will work. I think you can look around and see who is following their bliss and who is going for the short term gain. Those going for the short term pretty quickly develop empty spaces in their lives. They can keep seeking the thrill, but it gets increasingly difficult to get satisfaction. I admire those who found their bliss early and followed it.

The God Chemical

Interesting series going on NPR right now on the Morning Show, around 7:30 AM Central Time. Barbara Bradley Hagerty is looking in to the current research on the brain activity associated with the spiritual experience. This started back in the 60’s with the distillation of LSD, but was squashed after the Beatles split up or something. All five parts are already on their site in text and audio is being added as it is broadcast.

Here’s the first one. Links to the others should appear to the right on that page.

There is also an overview page with additional material.

Here you can read excerpts from Barbara’s book.

All very interesting, and since this is my blog, here’s my opinion. In the 2nd part, a neuroscientist, Michael Persing says, “from the point of neuroscience, all experience is generated by brain function”, then later, “the last illusion that we must overcome as a species is that God is an absolute.” Well maybe, but what is the evidence that God is an illusion? Generated by brain function, okay, but what is brain function? You can measure activity in a mass of gray matter, but what is really going on there? Another neuroscientist follows up with a statement that we don’t really know much, and I hope more people hear that.

I’m all for knowledge, it’s jumping to conclusions that gets us in trouble. Claiming you have heard from God when you actually had an epileptic seizure in your temporal lobe is equal to claiming that God does not exist because you can evoke a feeling of oneness with some electrodes. The key here in Persing’s statement is, “from the point of view of neuroscience”. Fights get started when one point of view ignores all the angles that need to be considered and claims to have the right answer. For example when neuroscientists start claiming that Moses was an epileptic. They should have read my blog, or watched Nova, and found out that Moses was probably not a real person. They look pretty silly now don’t they?

It gets dangerous when you extrapolate from experiments like this to discounting 4,000 years of prayer, writing, philosophy and community building. The earliest forms of religion may have come from myths about why there are rainbows or why we have many languages, but they have evolved in to something much more. The idea of a rule of law, where people are equal, instead of rule by a King over slaves, didn’t come from the Kings, it came from the priests.

If someone can figure out how to stick an electrode in my brain and have me write a speech that will bring peace in the Middle East, stick away. My fear is the opposite is more likely. If we have figured out how to induce a feeling of compassion, then we can also inhibit it. We need to decide real soon which of those we want.

Interestingly, I came across this related story today too. I like what the good doctor says about brain activity and being a people person are correlated, but we don't yet know if the brain determines that, or do our experiences affect brain growth.

Bible Geek on Ancient Myths

Here’s another one from Peter Mayer to enjoy while reading this short entry.

I made it on the Bible Geek last month. It’s really not that hard, he gets a few questions per week and answers them with audio. He always gives the question a lot of respect and is often entertaining. Unfortunately, they have cut off posts older than a few weeks, so it’s not there anymore. If it shows up in a archives list, I’ll you know. There was also a really good on called the “Metaphysics of Presence”.

My question was titled “Wanting to know more about ancient myths”. This question started brewing for me when a friend of mine directed me to the movie Zeitgeist. It’s free on the web. Among other things, it discusses the earlier dying and rising God myths that proceeded the time of the writing of the New Testament. Robert M. Price, The Bible Geek, has studied these extensively, and he agrees with the film makers that Jesus is just another myth. Price’s work is a bit more scholarly and a better place to start, IMHO, but the movie can be entertaining and an easy way to get started. Some may find the movie a bit over the top.

I tried to find out more about these other Gods and how they might have come to be mixed in with the Jewish traditions. I still have not found any direct historical links, but I don’t think you would find that with anything that old. I know a little of the stories of Osiris, Dyonisus and others, but not enough to say they do or do not overlap. A Zeitgeist response web site was a little help, but I wanted more. You can listen for yourself, but Robert basically said that these are archetypes, not copies. The earlier stories were “cardboard” characters, analogies of the changing of the seasons. Jesus was a much richer character, with the archetype of a virgin birth and resurrection included, and much more in between, including, in his opinion, new teaching from the rabbis of the time. He also gave me some titles that I hope to get to.

If you are really into philosophy, the “The Metaphysics of Presence” was really great. It’s going to take me a while to digest that one, so I may refer to it again, and hopefully it will be posted again. Among other things he said, no one owns the copyright on a religion. There are over 2,000 divisions of Protestantism, and within each some flexibility in their local churches is allowed, and every member is in a different place on their spiritual path and may be choosing to believe or not believe something that is not exactly in line with the church’s doctrine. So, to say that there is an “essence” of Christianity is a little silly. There are scriptures and teachings, and then there are people experiencing it. How it is taught changes over time, and how it is experienced by us is influenced by our time. Trying to get it right, and force one idea of what is right on others, just muddies the waters in my opinion, or as Prices says, “[Church/Spiritual experience] is helpful and beautiful and enjoyable, not that I think anyone is obliged to have it.”

It’s too much to cover in one blog, so just listen to Peter Mayer, and let all soak in.