Ugh, really? You devoted sixty-nine words to pointing out an iPhone autocorrect error?
It took me about a minute to write, and grammar is a subject that interests me and that I care a lot about. You're the one who apparently bothered counting.
Clearly somebody who actually is religious is going to be more invested in it than somebody who's willfully and vocally ignorant about the subject, yes. Caring about something less than somebody else does not automatically make you the smart or mature or interesting one, and it's frustrating because on other subjects you don't seem to think that it does--although if you do think that it might explain why you don't respect
Star Trek fandom.
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Okay, afleitch, I'm going to get into this in some detail. This might be a little disjointed because I had a glass of white wine and am coming into this religious debate with you straight off a political debate with my great-uncle, but here's a try:
Before we begin I’d like to observe that the arguments that I make and positions that I take intellectually, academically, and philosophically in some respects differ from my actual personal beliefs. As you’ve noted, my personal religious beliefs are barely prevented from plumbing the depths of traditionalist conservative High Anglicanism by the fact that I and most of my close friends are queer; my academic and philosophical positions tend to be more pluralist and multiculturalist and in some sense subjective. I don’t view this as dishonesty on my part; I consider that different arguments and perspectives are called for in different registers of discourse. Precisely because I don’t view this or want this to come across as dishonest, while I’ll generally be hewing to the academic to the best of my ability for purposes of this discussion, I’ll try to make note of points in which my intellectual view and my subjective personal view are different, in situations in which it might not be obvious.
First let me say that I’m sorry if I misrepresented what you were claiming the empiricist position was in my response to Joe above. I can’t say I’m
particularly sorry for the rest of that since I find his way of talking about these issues egregiously ignorant and patently offensive and only regret my apparent inability to resist the temptation to respond in kind, but for any misrepresentation or miscommunication of your position I’m sincerely sorry.
That aside, I definitely think that there’s merit to your idea of those two types of people, those of religious/superstitious inclination and those of rational/empiricist inclination; it’s a little hard for me to fully accept it (or, rather, to fully integrate it) on theological terms, as is probably obvious, but as a psychological distinction I think it’s valid and useful and when you originally advanced this idea a while back I found it very interesting. What I think is important about this especially is to establish that at least in my view it isn’t necessarily
different experiences that are being apprehended, just different ways of understanding those experiences. This might seem obvious but I feel the need to state it to clarify that I am not, at least in this sense, a postmodernist; I think that God
actually exists and that the world that people
actually live in is more or less the same for everyone. (This is my persona/theological position.) I am, however (and this is my intellectual/academic position), in a position of entertaining suspicion as to whether, different people’s experiences being what they are and people in general being what they are, it’s possible for either empirical or rational observation to fully explore certain areas of psychology and--
especially--metaphysics. For me, taking the realist position makes things more woolly and subjective than they would be otherwise, not less, because we can't simply say that two people have different perspectives because they live in literally different worlds, but I'm also reluctant to discount or denigrate people's self-accounts of their experiences and perspectives--call it the intellectual influence of William James. (This position isn’t only some sort of weapon to deploy against secular humanism; it’s also soured me considerably on a lot of the traditional arguments for the existence of God and in general a lot of Catholic theology to which I’d otherwise be more than sympathetic.) This affects how I interpret some of the ideas that you bring up further down in your post, in ways that I will get to in a minute.
(N.B. I’m not particularly proud of the above paragraph and hope it makes an adequate amount of sense.)
You’re absolutely right that it’s a lot easier to make this interpretation square with a secular worldview than a spiritual one, all things being equal, because secular worldviews do tend not to be as exclusionary in the realm of ethics (although I’d argue that there’s little to no marked difference between secular and spiritual worldviews
in general when it comes to being exclusionary about epistemology or metaphysics. There are of course exceptions to this.) This is why I say that this psychological insight is as a psychological insight not one that I would argue against but is hard to navigate in terms of Christian theology without admitting a more relativist or postmodernist understanding than I am entirely comfortable with. This isn’t to say that I think that acknowledging it is dangerous to my Christianity in its fundaments—I would guess that you don’t consider having these sorts of conversations to present much challenge or danger to your atheism, and I don’t think they do to my Christianity either, even though I’m easily offended and get really prickly and defensive sometimes—but it’s worth admitting.
We indeed are probably going to have to part company on the question of whether or not secondhand, cultural or doctrinal, religious experience should be subject to the same or greater skepticism as claimed direct mystical experiences. I do place a somewhat higher premium on questions of social functioning and function than a lot of people do—hence the parenthetical digression in my response to Joe about how even if somebody may technically be ‘hallucinating’ questioning their mental health may not be the best way to go interpreting their experience or behavior—and so the fact that most people don’t really venture beyond a culturally engrained understanding is one that my first instinct, speaking academically or philosophically, is to be a pragmatist about. (Again, this isn’t speaking theologically, but…) What does it matter if Chiyoko may see Kannon-bosatsu descend to her where Alizon may see the Blessed Virgin? Does the fact of that difference, in and of itself, affect the truth value of either? I don’t want to get into some sort of speculative sub-Jungian analysis here but; that’s not the sense in which I’m asking that question; but I think that in this respect religious and mystical experiences are valuable in part precisely
as cultural artifacts--and yes, I'm aware that this is one of the positions of mine that unavoidably approaches a sort of vaguetheistic multiculturalism-for-its-own-sake way of thinking that I prefer to avoid whenever possible but sometimes find myself unable to. In other words I don’t really consider that this is different from the problem of religious pluralism in general, on which I’ve in the past taken a position similar to the
honji-suijaku-setsu but am currently less than sure about my precise theological opinion--and since this
is a question of pluralism, my theological positioning and academic positioning are going to be independently staked out here more so than almost anywhere else, even if they're not hugely
different.
One point where I do have to take issue with what you’re saying is this idea that ascribing the neurological processes that you describe—accurately, I can only assume, and a cursory Google search seems to indicate that you do have a pretty good understanding of this subject—to supernatural or divine manifestations is ‘plagiaristic’. While that’s an understandable position to take, it isn’t going to make much sense or do much to deter the stance of someone who has a notion of an immanent Godhead. By this I mean that if somebody’s mental orientation inclines them to perceive divine powers active in the world, then the fact that the way their visions work mechanically speaking can be ascribed to (for instance) action of their optic nerves
shouldn’t, in principle, deter them from thinking that semantically or spiritually speaking it can be ascribed to a god or a saint or a buddha. (It’s understandable why it might anyway, but I don’t think that in principle it
should.) There’s an ignominious god-of-the-gaps sort of assumption that I see behind the thinking of people who believe that their religious interpretations of things will be invalidated if those things also have scientific explanations. It’s great that you have such an interested and positive relationship with the idea of the fundamental simplicity of your own consciousness but this does, I think, come back to the point that you made earlier on about the religious/superstitious v. rational/empirical distinction. For somebody hardwired for religion/superstition I don’t think that scientific explanations, even if they are acknowledged and accepted as fact, should be particularly damaging to interpretations derived from that hardwiring, except perhaps in the cases of specific myths regarding ancient history or prehistory. So in that sense I’m with the late Stephen Jay Gould on this, although coming from the opposite side of the divide.
Okay, that’s all I have to say on this subject for now. I hope all of that made sense.
Poll
