Oh, joy. David Brooks has blessed us with a Christmas column this week, titled The Subtle Sensations of Faith. You can tell already that it’s going to be a lump of drivel in your stocking, can’t you?
With Hanukkah coming to an end, Christmas days away, and people taking time off work, we are in a season of quickened faith. When you watch people exercise that faith, whether lighting candles or attending Midnight Mass, the first thing you see is how surprising it is. You’d think faith would be a simple holding of belief, or a confidence in things unseen, but, in real life, faith is unpredictable and ever-changing.
Well, I think it’s surprising, because so much of what people do in the name of faith is pointless, or absurd, or damaging. What Brooks is doing here is aspiring to a Gladwellesque counter-intuitive twist, but it doesn’t work, because there isn’t a surprise there: I don’t think faith is simple at all, and am quite accustomed to people throwing out random, bizarre excuses for it, so Brooks is simply representing the standard believer trope. Look at my faith! Isn’t it wonderful and weird?
It begins, for many people, with an elusive experience of wonder and mystery. The best modern book on belief is “My Bright Abyss” by my Yale colleague, Christian Wiman. In it, he writes, “When I hear people say they have no religious impulse whatsoever … I always want to respond: Really? You have never felt overwhelmed by, and in some way inadequate to, an experience in your life, have never felt something in yourself staking a claim beyond yourself, some wordless mystery straining through word to reach you? Never?”
Ah! I recognize that too familiar game! Religion is a greedy superstition, and it tries to appropriate to itself all human experience. Every benign sensation you have — love, joy, contentment, wonder — is attributed to God, and if you should feel baffled and ignorant about something…well, it’s because you’re so small compared to the awesome majesty of the Lord, and if you just have faith, you can replace that curious sensation of not-knowing with confidence that He has the answer.
So yes, Mr Wiman, I often have the experience of awe and wonder and know that I don’t have all the answers, and I love that feeling that there’s more to the universe than my tiny speck of perspective can encompass, and am thrilled by the existence of mysteries beyond myself. But I’m a scientist, and what they do is provoke me to try to find the answers, rather than to numb my brain with the novocaine of religious platitudes, and I do not find consolation in the fantasy of a deity who already knows everything, nor do I pretend to have knowledge by proxy because my good buddy Jesus is sooo smart. So when someone tries to appropriate my curiosity and my awareness of my limitations as a “religious impulse”, I just say, “fuck you,” and resent that attempt to substitute ignorance for inquiry.
That’s the primary theological payload of Brooks’ column: faith is good, faith is universal, faith fortunately doesn’t demand that you think too hard, because it’s complicated and contradictory anyway. The rest of the column is just bleatitudes, pretentious pap dressed up with feel-good adjectives to reassure everyone that the primary message is good.
Most believers seem to have had these magical moments of wonder and clearest consciousness, which suggested a dimension of existence beyond the everyday. Maybe it happened during childbirth, with music, in nature, in love or pain, or during a moment of overwhelming gratitude and exaltation.
These glimmering experiences are not in themselves faith, but they are the seed of faith. As Wiman writes, “Religion is not made of these moments; religion is the means of making these moments part of your life rather than merely radical intrusions so foreign and perhaps even fearsome that you can’t even acknowledge their existence afterward. Religion is what you do with these moments of over-mastery in your life.”
These moments provide an intimation of ethical perfection and merciful love. They arouse a longing within many people to integrate that glimpsed eternal goodness into their practical lives. This longing is faith. It’s not one emotion because it encompasses so many emotions. It’s not one idea because it contains contradictory ideas. It’s a state of motivation, a desire to reunite with that glimpsed moral beauty and incorporate it into everyday living.
See what I mean? It’s all noise packaged up with dewily benevolent words to hide what it actually is: worshipping ignorance and burying curiosity under complacency.
It’s a hard process. After the transcendent glimpses, people forget. Their spirits go dry and they doubt anything ever happened. But believers try, as Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel put it, to stay faithful to those events. They assent to some spiritual element they still sense planted in themselves.
“Stay faithful to those events” translates as “cling desperately to denial and a superstitious interpretation”. It’s not a good thing.
I have a different message.
Recognize that faith is the enemy, and resistance a virtue. Don’t be reconciled to the unknown, and especially don’t hide it away as adequately answered by belief in an omniscient god. Be frustrated by your ignorance, let yourself be unsatisfied by an absence of answers, and let that drive you to look for real knowledge, not the pretense of knowing provided by the lies of religion.
The biggest mistake Epicurus made is that he failed to understand that doubt is good. He thought it caused fear, so he went on to invent dogma – and the religions around him and his followers ran with it.
Oh, this is such an old one: “Ignorance is Bliss”. Nuthin’ truer than that.
David Brooks infuriates me. He illustrates a modern horror: Petty words that read well and mean nothing, written by a man given everything in life, in service to those with even more power than he. This will always be given an outsized audience and influence. Everything PZ pointed out about his banal defense of the bullshit most everyone believes anyway could be said about any Brooks column ever. Pitying the poor billionaire, defending the Pentagon, encouraging Imperial ambition, Brooks truly never met an indefensible position he would not bow down to – OF COURSE religion is on his list. OF COURSE it’s just the most superficial feel-good parts. He probably sits down in his brandy bunker for cigars with his wall street overlords and chuckles about the church keeping the plebes in line after rattling off this idiocy.
In my youth, I had a number of transcendent experiences.
These stopped when I stopped dropping acid.
To me, it’s pretty easy. Is there something about the experience that can be proven to be external? Is there something about anyone’s experience that can be proven to be external? Has anyone ever learned anything from their feelings of transcendence?
If not, it’s just another way of indulging yourself and you should continue to make reality-based decisions. It’s awfully egotistical to assume your brain blasts are messages from the creator of the universe and incredibly selfish to act as if you were right.
Christian Wiman writes:
Implying that “overwhelmed” is a “religious impulse”. Really? Is that so? I don’t think that word (religion) means what you think it means. This little quote is totally in conflict with my own experiences. I’ve been overwhelmed by many things, and revelled in the beauty of many musics, and architectures, poetry and artwork; but have definitely never had a “religious impulse” and did not simply deny it. Religious impulse is just a poor attempt to explain those overwhelming events with a too simple conception of a god causing the overwhelmic event (and doing so without letting “reason” intrude on the confabulation).
“You have never felt overwhelmed by, and in some way inadequate to, an experience in your life, have never felt something in yourself staking a claim beyond yourself, some wordless mystery straining through word to reach you? Never?””
I feel like that on every climax.
Oh…god Oh..god Oh.god oh god oh god OH GOD!!!
Wonder? Mystery?
More like tradition and habit.
You go to midnight mass because that’s the thing you do on Christmas Eve (with an extra ooomph if you are young enough or reined in hard enough not to be able to go anywhere that late the rest of the time). Maybe it’s also time to unite the family (or at least make them attend a thing together).
You go to the mass the next morning because that’s the thing that is done on Christmas because you are more of a Catholic than those wishy washy folks who were just interested in all the bells and whistles of midnight mass.
I have experienced a number of transcendent episodes – the death of several lovers and the beauty of an artistic but still devastating nervous breakdown and several years in what was essentially a fugue state. These experiences are important to me. I don’t know how to explain them to people when they ask – but that doesn’t mean I ascribe any to religious experience. Which prophet do I guarantee has the niche on my particular experience? Which god do I run to knowing that my experiences are subjective and perfectly explicable with the study of stress, neuroscience, psychology? Just because I’m not smart enough to figure it all out, I’d rather not compound my failure to understand by throwing it all at the feet of some imaginary magician.
There is beauty in experience and even in horror – there is nothing in religion except excuses and platitudes – if anything religion makes these very human episodes more humdrum and dull. They deny the absolute importance of my real relationships and the connection I have to this world through my (admittedly subjective) senses. The supernatural always seems to be so mundane. The profane offers more. Religion isn’t poetry – it’s codification and limitation. The exact opposite of what these bullshit merchants are desperately marketing.
The KEY phrase is, “Have you never felt overwhelmed . . .”
By accepting the equating of “being overwhelmed” with “our religion”, the process of submitting yourself, mind and body, to superstition, is complete.
And it’s very quick.
And it’s very common.
After all, who has not ever been overwhelmed many, many times in their life by the universe, by human nature, by the cruelty of physics and biology, by our many disappointments and harsh revelations?
It is a sneaky, effective, and devastating emotional/intellectual attack, as is evidenced by the number of people who have succumbed.
Fuck you, David Brooks.
Every time someone hijacks having a sense of wonder and awe to mean “That’s faith and god!”, I am reminded that English needs a better poetic expression for such experiences besides “spiritual”. I love that Japan already has a word that means “a profound, mysterious sense of the beauty of the universe” which doesn’t imply that by feeling it you are being connected to another plane of existence, that word being Yugen (幽玄). The idea of Yugen is that there is simply too much of nature for one person to grasp fully, and that this smallness in the face of everything and the overwhelming totality have their own beauty to be appreciate. There also isn’t an implication in Yugen that attempting to understand the world will destroy that “beautiful mystery”, but instead the idea that there is always going to be too much for one person to fully grasp no matter how much people as a whole have come to understand.
Transcendental mystical blah blah shite are codewords for “more tithing! moar children!”.
Or just put it aside and have a beer if that’s what you’re inclined to do that day. The universe can wait.
I have had some *odd* experiences, and knowing what they were was part of the amazement. Science is wonderful.
There is a church in Ozark, Missouri, called the “Overcoming Faith” Church. The name always makes me smile.
HumanisticJones, that’s a great word. Because I like the idea that while humanity’s understanding is growing, I can’t know all of human knowledge personally because my time is far smaller than billions of people over thousands of years or longer*. Which does make me feel a bit overwhelmed and inadequate, but proud that even if I can only add a bit to human knowledge, I can add to it and help others do the same.
* Counting since the advent of writing, though local knowledge like ‘hey, the bark of this tree really helps the aches and pains’ or ‘when that bright star rises near dawn, the yearly floods are coming’ has existed longer.
I remember one particular such experience, in the theatre at Taliesin. Everything about the space was perfect. The size and shape of the space is just the embodiment of perfection.
Never mind that the lobby is too short for me to stand up. Even so, the space is some kind of Platonic ideal of beauty.
So, should I worship Frank Lloyd Wright? Is he a god? And how do I know he is the right one to worship? I’ve also had some pretty transcendent experiences reading Pratchett; maybe I should instead worship the oh god of hangovers.
So confusing!
LIke everyone, I’ve felt wonder and awe and emotions that take me out of myself. From when I was a child, of course.
But, those lead to faith? I’ve never felt a trace of faith, not even once in my entire life. So, even as a child, I allowed my “spirit to go dry”, etc.?
Brooks forgets that many of these “transcendent” moments are stimulated by the ingestion of hallucenogenic drugs. Does every LSD trip lead to faith?
garnetstar @ 17:
There can be bad trips on LSD but there is evidence that some drugs/substances do have “transcendent” effects:
to garnetstar @ 17:
There can be bad trips on LSD but there is evidence that some drugs/substances do have “transcendent” effects:
Another religious person who has never spent time reading the holy books of religion.
for garnetstar @ 17:
There sure can be bad trips on LSD but there’s also evidence that some drugs/substances really do have “transcendent” effects:
test
O.K., for garnetstar @ 17:
There is clinical evidence that high doses of psilocybin induces significant mystical experiences that can lead to long-term effects and changes in behavior.
Yes, I think that captures it completely. The hijacking of the sense of awe and wonder one feels at the sheer magnitude of the universe for a religious purpose. I get so annoyed when people do that. It’s insulting and condescending.
As if us atheists are unaware of awe and joy and wonder. Bullshit. It’s just that we don’t ascribe those feelings to a third party. The interaction between us and the universe is plenty, thanks. No need to insert an unwanted and unneeded deity in there.
“…we are in a season of quickened faith…”
Firstly, whateverinthehellisthat?
Secondly, I’m not worried, all my shots are up to date.
I have had this argument (online) with many of the faithful, they say you cannot have a transcendent/ecstatic experience without God. Funny that, because for the last 40 years the only times I have been in Church is for the architecture. On the other hand I have had ecstasies playing chess, sport fencing, doing T’ai Chi, standing on Wenlock Edge, playing bridge and during a particularly colourful sunrise.
Not only have other chess players told me of the same experiences there are runners and rock climbers who have described the same experience to me. There have been mathematicians who have written about it (e.g. Roger Penrose in “The Emperors New Mind”).
Faith is good… faith fortunately doesn’t demand that you think too hard…
Why is “not thinking too hard” seen as a good thing by so many people? Unfortunately, a lot of the secular psychological community buys into this, too… going on about how too much thinking is “analysis paralysis”, confusing rumination with introspection, going on and on about how “believing in some higher power” makes you a happier, more resilient person, etc.
Makes me think of those poor soldiers who were deemed to have an extra psychological risk, (low in “resilience”) and therefore were in need of “spiritual counseling”, if they dared say that they were not religious.
Ugh, David Brooks. He looks like he’s had plastic surgery to have a smug, “I know you better than you know yourself” smile permanently etched on his lips. Probably THE epitome of concern troll… he says all that patronizing stuff because he CARES about you, don’t you know.
And don’t even get me started on his Social Animal. Otherwise translated as: “Peer pressure is good for you! Following the crowd makes you healthy and happy! Thinking for yourself gives you too much stress and cortisol!”
Yes, this elevation and escalation of “faith” is one of the major reason atheists and atheism are despised by so many. No, it’s not because we are “arguing” with people. This is only viewed with horror because atheists and atheism are already despised for other reasons. If every noble impulse and inspiration is “religion,” then what does that say about the nonreligious?
I have a friend who is a professional Spiritual Counselor and an enthusiastic proponent and teacher of “faith.” So I asked her to define the word. This request apparently confused her and she rezally had to think about this one (wtf?) She eventually said it meant “I don’t know.”
Faith is admitting you don’t know everything and it’s okay that you don’t.
Which is bullshit — even she doesn’t think it means that, as slowly became clear as I continued to ask her questions which she painfully and reluctantly answered and it turns out that faith is that ‘humble’ state of mind which opens and accepts the existence of a Higher Power (in her case, the Universal Mind of Pure Love.) But didn’t it sound at first like something even a secular humanist could agree with?
They do this on purpose. That is, they may not be conscious of it but this slippy slidy secularization of faith is part of the strategy of granting it unearned credibility. If faith means “I don’t know everything” and an atheist STILL isn’t jumping up and embracing the religious (if not religion itself), then atheists must think they know everything.
Which is one of the major tropes of anti-atheist prejudice and argument: we lack humility. We think we’re God. We don’t accept that the cosmos is just like a giant playpen created so that we might learn we are babies and need to say “thank you.” Atheists are ungrateful, too. And we don’t have experiences or feelings. And on it goes … all falling out of the need for the faithful to grab every decent aspect of human life and claim it either points to God or it’s not there because it’s “faith.”
It vividly reminds me of how alternative medicine often defines itself to the uninitiated in the most unassuming way it can. Alt med is endorsing a healthy lifestyle of diet and exercise while paying attention to the entire patient: they look for the underlying cause of illness, instead of just treating the symptoms. They look for safe, natural cures which have been proven effective. They care about the patient and listen. Gee, who objects to all that? Thus it’s another greedy attempt to appropriate and re-brand what’s already science-based and rational in order to demonize the other side and play innocent.
The biggest secret about the Bible is how UNtranscendent it is.
Translation: When you get tired of playing with your lights and tops, you Judeos know where to come for the good stuff.. David Brooks knows his audience, and right from his opening statement, treats all faiths with the respect they deserve.
thebookofdave: But like all modern-day Christianists, he makes sure that Jews have a seat at the kiddie table.
Sastra @ 29:
Faith is defined as a belief in things unseen, not just a declaration of not knowing. I think your friend really wasn’t all that confused about it, because obviously she has spiritual beliefs.
As for atheists lacking humility, I can’t imagine where anyone could possibly get that idea. How could such a place even exist? Surely, it must be a figment of the imagination, right? Bueller? Bueller?
Another problem with the “awe=proof of God” idea is that of the awe of people who don’t share your religion. So you either have to ignore this awe, adopt a wishy-washy “All beliefs are just different paths to the truth” stance, or admit at some point that yes, those other guys are capital W Wrong, and therefore either don’t really feel it, or are being duped by evil.
What, not subtle, scintillating, serene sensations of psychological certitude softly serenading slippery solipsistic assertions? Silly social stenographer, assert your savory serial sounds to the superlative extent! Celebrate the sumptuous season! (Seriously [heh], what is Brooks’s deal with alliterative consonance?)
Never, except for a time when I was tripping on mushrooms. I also saw everything through a cell-shading-like filter, melted into my mattress, experienced about fifteen minutes of overwhelming grief, and spent an hour making faces at the other me in the mirror, whom I interpreted as a distinct persona instead of a simple reflection. My brain was doing weird shit because I’d ingested a potent psychoactive alkaloid; “therefore God” is not a conclusion that follows from that experience. What else ya got?
Faith is believing in things with no evidence, and retaining those beliefs even in the face of contrary evidence. Once you’ve decided that’s A-OK, even a virtue, you’ve opened the door to believing anything you want, up to and including the idea that the Lord and Creator desires that you kill a few thousand or million strangers. Not only does it have nothing to do, really, with the awe and wonder we feel at the size, scope, and mysteries of the universe, it has the opposite effect–it pretends to know the answers to those mysteries, reducing everything to simple answers, simple easy-to-understand analogies to familiar things.
Fuck. Words mean things.
that thing we see of people exercising their faith by doing those things which have a religious history, is people doing superstitious rituals that will insure them of being happy at the obligatory “happiest time of the year” when the reality is likely a very mixed bag.
Religion and religious practice is a desperate attempt to cling to a particular feeling and make time stand still to turn all experience of life into one simple understandable thing. It is done by the same thinking children use when they personify everything and give it will. It is sustained by our love story which we all to easily mistake for reality.
I do not resent the religious exactly but I do not accept their judgement of me either. This time of year is probably the worst because there is an aura of obligation to follow the ritual in social practice in order to be accepted or worse pitied for your failure.
At least here in the US.
uncle frogy
Like so many Brooks pieces, utterly devoid of self awareness. This is the guy who argued for endless six month extensions to the Iraq fiasco. I have had enough of faith based policy initiatives.
Christian theology makes no sense. There is really no room for a a God who plays silly tricks like creating a universe that appears to be billions of years old and then send souls to perpetual torment for being fooled.
Judaismm and Islam have to explain why a sentient God would create and then ban bacon sandwiches.
There is a pretty good argument against every specific religion which is of course why Brooks deals in empty abstract platitudes.
god = a rush of chemicals to the head
@33, David Wilford
You just contradicted this freind, then declared she wasn’t confused? I’m not following.
At all.
Oh I can imagine where they get that idea. Same way most kinds of bigotry incubate.
Since faith is entirely arbitrary, with no firm connection to reality, this is hardly surprising. I got the same effect from listening to the stories my 4-year-old son spun.
David Wilford the incredibly humble@17, 23, 33
Has it occurred to you that psilocybin is a fairly simple chemical, resembling in its structure the neurotransmitter serotonin? If it has the effects claimed, it does so by its physical effect on the brain, just like drugs with less benign effects.
Well, my personal experience with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder suggests to me that too much thinking about something can indeed be paralyzing and very painful, in addition to usually being unhelpful in terms of actually learning about reality.
I realize you’re almost certainly not referring to OCD-type thinking, but I wonder if that’s what causes some psychologists to believe that too much thought is paralyzing. It can be.
Brooks fails to acknowledge the way conflicting faiths play out in the real world. He writes:
Indeed: That’s exactly what ISIS is doing when it enforces sharia by the sword. And that’s what the Catholic Church is doing when it fights contraception and abortion and gays. Who’s to say what it is that the creator loves? Or hates?
I’ve written a more thorough take-down here.
ah, so it is because the gods love it. Glad that’s been settled.
David Wilford, #23
No there isn’t, because mystical and transcendent are both bullshit unscientific terms. Therefore, effects induced by drugs can’t possibly be described like that in a scientific study.
Severe brain injury can also lead to long-term effects and changes in behavior.
But, but, but, but thinking is so hard! Why do I have to do it? I just want to feel good. Why should I worry about all that bad stuff? I don’t want to think about it. Leave me alone, you bad atheists! Don’t make me think.
Nick Gotts @ 42:
Oh sure, psilocybin is a chemical that has an effect on the brain, but it’s effects are dramatically different from those of serotonin. That’s why those researchers from Johns Hopkins University were curious about it in the first place. There’s been a great interest in psilocybin because it seems to have a beneficial effect on those who are in the last stages of terminal illness, as it seems to confer a, well, I’ll say it, a beneficial spiritual experience that allows them to accept their death peacefully. I don’t think that it’s a fraudulent experience, or that attaching descriptions such as “mystical” and “transcendent” is bullshit either.
Feel free to follow the link in the multiple posts I errantly made earlier today to the Johns Hopkins paper when my browser was having technical difficulties.
Of course YOU would. Any scientist would say they disassociate from the pain.
Nerd @ 50:
Dude, follow the link. They’re the ones describing it as a mystical experience, not me.
What does it say when some people have these “magic moments” and ascribe them to Jesus, and some ascribe them to the Jewish God, some to Allah? If everyone just assigns them to whichever religion they were raised in, it’s clear that that magic moment doesn’t actually tell you anything about God.
“Ignorance is Bliss”.
If ignorance was bliss, the faithful would be a lot happier than they appear to be.
David Wilford@49,
Jesus wept, your inability to graps a point never ceases to amaze. Of course psilocybin is different from serotonin in its effects. Of course I know that people who’ve taken it sometimes describe their experiences in mystical terms – and what would it even mean to say that such experiences are “fraudulent”? I daresay I have more familiarity with the related literature on it than you do – I wrote a dissertation on psychedelics as part of my psychology degree, and have followed the issue since. The point is the very fact that “mystical”, “transcendental” experiences can be fairly reliably produced by ingesting a simple organic chemical. Which suggests that there is nothing supernatural about them, and that there is no reason to accept any mystical beliefs that arise out of them as veridical.
Incidentally, for anyone curious about the effects, AFAIK it is still possible to buy psilocybin-containing fungi openly and with no risk of arrest in Amsterdam “head shops”. They strongly advise being cautious about the dose if it’s your first time, having someone with you who is sober, and above all taking them on an empty stomach.
I should also add, don’t take psilocybin if you are taking MAO-inhibitors, sometimes prescribed for depression. These prevent psilocin (the psychoactive metabolic product of psilocybin, and also itself present in the fungi) being broken down in the liver.
I took such mushrooms while in Amsterdam and while it was tremendously fun for me, you have to be a special kind of delusional idiot to think any of that is “mystical” or “trascendent”. It’s just pretty colours and shapes on the inside of your eyelids…for hours xD It’s not all that different from being moderately drunk and having a very vivid imagination…
@57, azhael
has anyone ever described mere experiences of colors and shapes as mystical? Usually experiences described as such are much much different.
Lightheadedness, mild euphoria and symetrical hallucinations are, as far as i understand, within what people describe as mystical, spiritual and trascendent…
And quite frankly, even if they don’t, the stuff they would describe with those terms is still nothing more than your brain doing weird stuff because strange mollecules are modifying the transmissions….wether it’s pretty colours behind your eyelids or feeling like you abandoned your body, it’s all in your head anyway.
I have heard many instances of paintings called “mystical”, “transcendent”, “awesome”, “joyful”, “inspirational”, etc. etc, blah, blah, bleh. Maybe that qualifies as paintings be: “mere colors and shapes”.
*cough* *ahem* *yak* Sorry, didn’t mean to nitpick ;-(
Love that.
Nick Gotts @ 54:
You may rest assured I don’t think drug-induced altered states of consciousness are actually supernatural phenomena, only that they are linked to such perceptions by those taking them. It’s an interesting subject that’s engaged people like William James, who wrote:
Of course James used nitrous oxide to stimulate such an altered state, and other self-styled researchers into the subject (Timothy Leary comes immediately to mind, naturally) have reported back on their experiences, not all of which were profound or particularly transcendent. My own take is that the alteration of ordinary consciousness allows for mental associations to be made that otherwise couldn’t take place, thanks to physiological changes in the brain that disrupt its normal functioning. Sometimes these associations are religious, sometimes they’re not as others here have noted in comments about bright lights and such. With respect to psilocybin, there does seem to be a commonality of experience that relates to relieving the fear death in terminally ill patients that you don’t get with other kinds of induced states, say like with N2O. Whether or not this could be beneficial in alleviating anxiety in those entering the end stage of life is being studied, but it’s difficult given the legal issues involved, thanks to them damned hippies back in the 1960s.
David Wilford@62,
I’m not sure whether you’re being sarcastic in your last sentence, but it’s perverse to blame 1960s hippies for the stupidity and stubbornness of today’s politicians.
Was going to go there and comment on the wondrous feeling of having passed gas, and if he thought his religion should misappropriate that too, but.. the comments are already closed. Also, can’t reply to the dipshit with the top post, by asking why it is inappropriate to call the author on what he said, but perfectly fine to denigrate everyone else’s experiences, by insisting they all lead to faith, somehow.
Sigh…
“It’s not one idea because it contains contradictory ideas.”
Well, he got that part right!
Abso-fucking-lutely! But what I do NOT do is sell the depth of those feelings appallingly short with meaningless platitudes that serve to end the curiosity that created those moments of wonder in the first place. I don’t end the question with a mind numbing and completely unsatisfying excuse for an answer. That’s where we differ.
David Wilford @33:
I’m sure Sastra knows that. What she’s speaking to is how believers define faith for themselves.
Ah, childbirth, so often regurgitated by the faithful as a moment that proves that god exists, or that everyone has moments of awe. I found the birth of my first son to be incredibly emotional. I was in tears and unable to speak afterward and overwhelmed with a feeling of joy. Of course, turns out that I have an entirely non-theological explanation for that. I hadn’t slept for over 24 hours, hadn’t eaten in quite a while either. I’d spent the last ten hours watching my wife go through hell on earth and engaging in some of the most bizarre and physically strenuous rituals in an effort to alleviate her suffering. And now it was all over and I had a beautiful, healthy child and my wife was drinking the giant ice cold orange juice that was her one request when it was done. I find it amazing that people fail to recognize how exhaustion and hunger can amp up emotional responses to simulate some kind of divine experience. That is, in fact, the root of a great many supposedly diving experiences. I can only imagine how much more powerful that would be if I’d actually gone through what my wife had and had the mad soup of labor hormones racing through my blood as well.
But god? Never crossed my mind for a second, why would it? This was the easiest thing in the world to explain. And the birth of our second child proved it, as we were not nearly so tired and it was not nearly so emotional.
Uh, sorry, didn’t catch that, I was watching a nun pray herself into an orgasm…
Yeah, OK, a bit crude, but same stupid thing – if it feels good, and no one is telling you its a sin, then, “God did it!” :p