Over at HuffPo, Rabbi and real estate magnate Alan Lurie takes up the question, “Can the existence of God ever be proven?” His answer: certainly not. Does that, then, mean that he gives up the idea of a God? Heavens, no! Don’t you know about the new theology?
Lurie compares arguments about God to a disagreement about a painting. One person may be deeply moved by the daubs of paint on a canvas, while another is left cold and unconvinced by the other’s emotional experience.
This person may try to explain her experience, but she will ultimately fail to convince someone who only sees pigment on canvas, and who may conclude that her experience is delusional, and that the study of aesthetics is a waste of time. To the person who was so deeply impacted by the painting, though, such an assertion completely misses the point, and does nothing to convince her that her experience is not real, and that she was not touched and expanded by her encounter.
An emotional experience with a painting is, of course, “real” in a different way than a celestial sky-fairy who cares about us and intervenes in the world is “real.” One is a subjective feeling about an object, the other an assertion about the existence and nature of something outside of oneself: a universal reality. People don’t kill each other about their different reactions to paintings, but they do when it comes to the nature of God.
To Lurie, then, the prime “proof” of God’s existence is the emotional experience of God, not evidence for the existence of a celestial being:
In this way, arguments and experiments can not prove the existence of God because God is not an hypothesis. For human beings, God is the experience of a transformative relationship with creation itself, in which we know that the Universe is inherently meaningful, that we were created for a staggering purpose that will unfold over eons, that love and gratitude are the essential actual materials of our lives and that we are holy beings.
The experience of a relationship with God is not one of religious doctrine, does not come from statistics, experiments or argument, and is certainly not in conflict with science and reason in any way. It is also not about righteous certainty or judgment. The experience of God expands the possibilities for our lives and increases the feeling of mystery and intellectual curiosity about the world. Reason and observation are crucial elements in faith. Faith and reason are not mutually exclusive and are no more in conflict than civil engineering and poetry.
As a rabbi and person of faith, I have no interest in proving the existence of God and certainly do not want to convert anyone to my religion or way of thinking. What I am passionate about, though, is helping bring others to an experience and relationship with God because I know that such a relationship can create powerful positive personal and communal transformation. One brings another to the experience of God not through philosophical or material proof, but through living the example of gratitude, purpose, compassion and love.
It’s not clear to me whether the good rabbi is an atheist who simply thinks that there are benefits to entertaining a “transformative relationship” with a nonexistent being (I’m reminded of the old joke, “What do you call a Jew who doesn’t believe in God?” Answer: “A Jew”), or simply someone who will buy the existence of a celestial being without proof (implied in “helping bring others to an experience and relationship with God”). And he fails to explore the consequences of bringing people into a relationship with a nonexistent being. Isn’t that really a lie, like having a transformative relationship with Harvey the Rabbit or the notion that David Koresh was a religious prophet? There’s a reason why Dawkins called his book The God Delusion.
It baffles me that these people take their ideas so seriously, but what’s really amazing is that others take them seriously—so desperate are they to take anything as “evidence” for God.
Lurie, who has apparently abandoned the traditional notion of God, still sees tremendous value in forming a relationship with a God who may not exist. That’s not only delusional, but condescending. Only clerical garb can render such ridiculous ideas immune to ridicule.
When I read this stuff, I’m often reminded of the first verse of T. S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men”:
We are the hollow men We are the stuffed men Leaning together Headpiece filled with straw. Alas! Our dried voices, when We whisper together Are quiet and meaningless As wind in dry grass Or rats’ feet over broken glass In our dry cellar Shape without form, shade without colour, Paralysed force, gesture without motion; Those who have crossed With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom Remember us—if at all—not as lost Violent souls, but only As the hollow men The stuffed men.
“The experience of God expands the possibilities for our lives and increases the feeling of mystery and intellectual curiosity about the world.”
Insert “Loki” into this statement and *nothing* changes. BTW, parts of his prose remind me of Terry Eagleton. Once again, conflating aesthetic phenomenology with the God of Abraham.
Deli-style brownie points for the T.S. Eliot reference!
But Eliot doesn’t even mention cats in this one.
Alternatively, substitute “Cthulhu” for “God”. With the added bonus that clearly Cthulhu will one day rise and devour us all.
The rise of Cthulhu is most definitely worthy of anticipation. However, I chose Loki because He is a shape-shifter — a feature that lends itself more readily to apophatic uncertainty principles.
…or insert ‘cod’ for god as this is codswallop.
I think that a lot of apologetics for God are simply a manifestation of a ‘belief in belief’. It is a notion of religion being a placebo of sorts. This ‘Placebianity’ works in the same way that a medical placebo does – those who believe they are receiving a functional drug will feel better, even though there is nothing physically happening from the tablet. At the same time those who both administer it and those who regularly take the placebo hate it when some nasty skeptic points out that the pill is nothing but sugar and paste, molded to look like it might actually do something since pointing out this uncomfortable fact destroys the necessary illusion.
I think this it, exactly.
People are ruining the illusion by all this back-talk to the God authorities.
Although there is some evidence that even when the patient knows that they are receiving a placebo there is a positive effect.
This could be attributed to the ritual surrounding the doctor/patient relationship and there is undoubtedly a parallel to the shaman/sucker relationship.
Unlike the christian gods, the medical placebo never tells them to start wars and effectively enslave children.
I love the painting metaphor. Then we can agree that someone who builds a multi-thousand square-foot building thousands of miles away from the painting to discuss at length every week how they feel about the painting, and what the painting is commanding them to do is BATSHIT crazy!
The problem with the premise, God exists, is that both terms, God and exists, are problematic. That God is, or was originally, a reference to the transcendent is a determinant that God cannot exist, but it’s still a good word, especially in expressive conversation.
Damn god It!
😉
The real problem is, if God is merely an emotional experience, that the followers of countless gods around the world still insist on killing adherents of other emotional experiences, and foisting their twisted morality onto everyone else with absolutely no basis in fact.
Frankly, I’ve never understood people who don’t care whether their beliefs are true or not.
I’ve run across this “religion is like art” meme before, from a minister friend. It’s OK up to a certain point — certainly some religious activities can be beautiful, like the better sort of religious music.
Where I can’t follow is to suppose that such things have any value beyond the aesthetic.
A corollary to this is that many believe that if you are an atheist, you are not “spiritual,” which includes the incapability of appreciating art and music, the incapability of feeling compassion, the incapability to forgive, etc.–in other words, you are an unfeeling monster.
But it does cut to a fundamental truth about why people want to believe.
I was always struck that Waugh wrote this scene between Charles the a religious and Sebastian the “half-heathen” Catholic in Brideshead Revisited as a convert to Catholicism:
“But, my dear Sebastian, you can’t seriously believe it all?”
“Can’t I?”
“I mean about Christmas and the star and the three kings and the ox and the ass.”
“Oh, yes, I believe that. It’s a lovely idea.”
But you can’t believe things because they’re a lovely idea.”
“But I do. That’s how I believe.”
As Julia Sweeney pointed out what we say we believe when we are speaking from faith is what we “feel.” Even as the evidence mounts that it can’t be true we hold on, like a child clinging to Santa Claus, because we feel it to be true. And it comforts us. (My sister and I actually thought if we convinced our Mom and Dad that Santa was real he’d come back into existence – and we haven’t even read Peter Pan!)
Peter deVries has it all summed up in his 1958 (!) novel “Mackerel Plaza”: the Reverend Mackerel, the oh-so-progressive pastor of People’s Liberal, assures his flock that “It is the final proof of God’s omnipotence that he need not exist in order to save us.”
Incidentally deVries, via Rev. Mackerel, came up with the notion “Belief in belief” way back then, just a tad before Dan Dennett explained what it meant.
I once had a rather frustrating on-line exchange with a Christian friend in which we took several rounds to clear up the distinction between the reality of subjective experience as such and the reality of whatever external entity was the alleged object or stimulus of that experience. She seemed to think that saying God doesn’t exist meant she didn’t really feel what she felt. The good rabbi seems to be suffering from a similar confusion, though his resolution is to take emotional states and label them “God”. C.S.Lewis (as I recall from Surprised By Joy) seems to have gone a similar route, in that he gradually reified emotional and aesthetic stimuli into theology (which just happened to be the Anglicanism of his culture and youth.
If I failed to “get” the same experience from a painting as you, I would not dismiss your experience as non-real, I would simply put it down to a difference in our respective aesthetic senses. As it happens, I find most visual art (pardon the pun) opaque — I’m more stimulated by aural experience. So if you really groove on that painting and I find it “meh”, that’s nice for you, and I’ll just go listen to some Bach. I don’t regard aesthetic judgements as true or false in the same way mathematical or scientific claims — to the extent there is anything objective in aesthetics, it’s in the nature of generalizations about human perceptual psychology, and therefore subject to much individual variation.
“She seemed to think that saying God doesn’t exist meant she didn’t really feel what she felt.”
That makes sense in the same way that telling you your partner is abusive and doesn’t love you means that you don’t really feel love for that partner.
And by that I mean, it doesn’t make any damn sense.
I have this conversation a lot with online Xtians.
I will continue to point out to them that the experience may be felt, but ascribing that feeling to a supernatural source is an error.
Of course, one can also point out that if there were but one “true” god, then one might expect that only adherent to that god concept would have an experience of god.
That the same emotional experience can be had by Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindi, Hare Krishna, and the Heaven’s Gate adherents speaks to the non-external source of the emotion.
It’s all in your head.
A lot of people seem to define God as ‘the difficult struggle to convince yourself that there is a god’. This guy seems like he’s of that variety. For this type, it’s important not to define God too well, because clear definitions make struggles potentially resolvable.
PS:T.S. Eliot wrote some fucking awesome poems.
That’s right-on.
The early ones – the more overtly Xtian they got, the worse they got. With the exception of Burnt Norton, The Four Quartets are a curate’s egg: a few good bits in a mess of mediocre versification. The best are ‘Prufrock’, ‘The Waste Land’ and ‘Sweeney Agonistes’; those really are brilliant. Incidentally, I think that by the ‘hollow men’ TSE was referring to rationalists and, presciently, to gnu atheists. Good for JC (Jerry Coyne, that is) for the re-labelling…
Also I suspect the ‘hollow men’ would refer, too, to the ‘free-thinking jews’ (TSE almost used a lower-case ‘j’ in this connexion, and I think he did here – I quote from memory) that TSE, along with his pal Ezra Pound, thought were bringing about the downfall of European (in Pound’s case, not Xtian) civilisation: Bleistein, somebody (Rachel?) ‘nee Rabinovich’, the ‘jew’ beneath the lot in ‘Gerontion’: ‘money in furs’… Good verse and despicable sentiments.
For TSE, only the properly Xtian were properly spiritual, and therefore not hollow.
Call me old-fashioned, but I like The Hippopotamus:
The broad-backed hippopotamus
Rests on his belly in the mud; Although he seems so firm to us
He is merely flesh and blood.
Flesh-and-blood is weak and frail,
Susceptible to nervous shock;
While the True Church can never fail
For it is based upon a rock.
The hippo’s feeble steps may err
In compassing material ends,
While the True Church need never stir
To gather in its dividends.
The ‘potamus can never reach
The mango on the mango-tree;
But fruits of pomegranate and peach
Refresh the Church from over sea.
At mating time the hippo’s voice
Betrays inflexions hoarse and odd,
But every week we hear rejoice
The Church, at being one with God.
The hippopotamus’s day
Is passed in sleep; at night he hunts;
God works in a mysterious way–
The Church can sleep and feed at once.
I saw the ‘potamus take wing
Ascending from the damp savannas,
And quiring angels round him sing
The praise of God, in loud hosannas.
Blood of the Lamb shall wash him clean
And him shall heavenly arms enfold,
Among the saints he shall be seen
Performing on a harp of gold.
He shall be washed as white as snow,
By all the martyr’d virgins kist,
While the True Church remains below
Wrapt in the old miasmal mist.
– A pity he never took on religion the way this takes on the church.
(cross fingers about the formatting of this)
Not a big fan of this argument. If I look at a painting and fail to be moved by it in the same way someone else is, at least we can agree that there is a piece of canvas with daubs of pigment on it. To accept his comparison is to have to accept the premise that there is a god of some sort.
Yes, but if you walked up to anyone, believer or not, and started extolling the virtues of the imaginary painting you hold in your hands they are rather likely to conclude you are delusional.
Yes, absolutely. It is an inapt, not to mention inept analogy. The real question, rather, is whether the painting actually exists or not. Is this an actual, honest-to-goodness example of petitio principii? It’s an error so often mistakenly leveled, I’m a little trigger-shy in doing so.
no, no, no, you missed the point.
To accept his comparison, is to accept the premise that you both have the capability to feel strong emotions generated by the painting. The painting is not god, the painting is the world. God is a highly emotional, specific, subjective experience generated by the painting. The good rabbi has thus painted himself into a corner. He’s hidden god in the gap of ‘what the hell IS consciousness and subjective experience anyway?’.
unfortunately for the rabbi, we’re diligently working on that problem as well. and when we come up with a well understood, nuts and bolts explanation of where the feeling of religious bliss comes from…one we can turn on and off like a switch… well then so much for that gap.
I thought the rabbi described religious experience beautifully, btw. it really is a fun, moving, wonderful high – sometimes i think a lot of my fellow atheists have never even felt that way, they way they respond to these theological arguments.
That joke reminds me of a line a college friend used when discussing religion:
“You know, there’s more to Judaism than just bagels and atheism.”
We can know facts about the universe by having a transformative emotional experience? Do, tell, Rabbi. How can an emotional experience give us knowledge about anything outside of ourselves?
Gah! Impact is a noun.
And a verb….
Well, if you’re thinking of teeth, I should think “impacted” is more of an adjective, rather than a verb with an implied object. It’s more clumsy to say: “her molars were impacted” than “she has impacted molars”.
Otherwise (not to sound superduper pedantic), I find the process whereby incorrect usage eventually becomes licit just because so many people “do it rong” distasteful. We aren’t eventually going to say: “Ok, I guess we can get on board with this god thing” just because so many other people out there insist on it, are we?
Lurie’s construction is the classic example of how not to use “impact”.
So you find the evolution of language distasteful?
Pidgins happen whether you like it or not I’m pretty sure.
Motivated by Grammar is a great anti-prescriptivist blog you should check out.
Well, when you put it like that, no. I’m not put off that it happens. I’m sure there are often good and interesting reasons for certain changes. What bothers me is when argumentum ad populum exerts itself so successfully. Why should we accept it in this context when we don’t in others?
Let me clue you in on one of the fundamental features of human language: it is arbitrary. “Tree” means “a leafy thing with trunk” because there is a community of speakers who use it that way. There is no other reason.
To say that evolution is true is to make an objective claim about the history of life on Earth, and reality cannot be changed by popular vote. Conversely, it is not a fact of the universe that the sound pattern “tree” has to refer leafy things with trunks. There was a time when “tree” did not mean this, in most languages it does not mean this, and even in English there may come a time in the future when it does not mean this. So to say that “tree” means “a leafy thing with a trunk” is really to say that there is a community of speakers who use it that way. Notice that this is, by definition, a matter of popular vote. If no one used “tree” the way we do in English, it would not exist. And if everyone used “qwantz” the way we use tree, then quantz would exist.
The word ‘Deer’ is a very good example of this process. Once it meant animals in general now it means a particular group of animals, at some point it may mean something else entirely.
Prescriptivism is a sort of weird religion in itself, with sacred texts (Elements of Style) and irrational dogmas (no split infinitives, no verbalization, no epicene they).
Well, that’s quite an untenable position, Mr. JS!
According to the OED, “impact” has been used as a verb in writing since at least 1601. And if it was in writing in 1601, that means it was used in speech even before that.
But 400+ years of existence as a verb is not enough, is it? I mean, after all, such usage was “incorrect” when it first started… if “incorrect” means that no one had ever done it before. Of course, before man invented language, no word had ever meant anything before. But we shouldn’t get held up in logical details such as these. If a word is not a verb, it should never become one.
So I know that I would never hear you talk of tabling a motion or chairing a meeting, let alone sanctioning, envisioning, propositioning or stationing something! Those verbs came from nouns, and nouns is what they must remain.
Similarly with “fun.” Fun is an adjective that came from a noun that started off as a verb! Now, we hardly ever use it as a verb, and saying “we had a fun time” seems completely natural. But we are, of course, wrong – because this is after all incorrect usage. Quite distasteful, indeed.
To take this reasoning to its logical conclusion, we should all go back to speaking Middle English, since all of the grammatical and semantic changes that have taken place since the time of Chaucer are the result of people speaking wrong. Er, wait, but Middle English is a bastardized version of Old English – so we should really go back to speaking that. No wait, Old English came from Anglo-Frisian….
It appears I’ve been trounced! And also significantly derailed the thread. Wasn’t my intention, honestly. I won’t let “impact” as a verb bother me any longer.
(Something deep inside me still wants to say that we must insist on some conventions, arbitrary though they may be. How could we communicate, otherwise? I’ll leave it to the linguists to determine what those conventions are.)
Despite its hoary history, I, too, dislike the verb ‘impact’ – perhaps it’s the kind of people who use it and the reasons why they use it – often they seem to want sound snappy, up-to-date, and, if I may coin an adjective ‘impactive’; though a favourite writer, David Lewis-Williams, uses it regularly. Perhaps the question is similar to that of those two people looking at the painting, one of whom is impacted by it, and the other is left unscathed and standing…
I agree with you about conventions.
The same thing happened to me on another forum when I derided someone for using “trend” as a verb. Turns out it was a verb in English before it was a noun. And I majored in linguistics, so I knew how to look that up. Eating crow isn’t so bad – tastes like chicken.
What’s wrong with verbification if the meaning is clear? Even if there wasn’t historical evidence for use as a verb, why should I care?
“Lurie’s construction is the classic example of how not to use “impact”.”
Unless the painting fell and hit you on the head. Then you’d be deeply impacted by it.
I like to think of language, and its elements, as being like those giant flags they carry into the Olympic Games. So long as everyone pulls it in the same direction, everything is fine, but if a group of people decide to pull in another direction, either the whole flag goes that way, or it tears.
I’m prescriptivist when I can see a reason for using or avoiding a particular word or usage, such as when it creates ambiguity. On the one hand, I strongly advocate the epicene “they” where gender is unknown or unimportant as a step towards equality (especially when including intersex people – they teach you about your preconceptions about gender in a big way. On the other hand, living on an island, I hate the ambiguity of “offshore” when we have the perfectly good words “overseas” and “abroad” to mean “onshore in another country”.
Exactly.
I actually don’t have a major problem with the rabbis reasoning, with that important caveat. If someone has a personal religious feeling that makes them feel good, hey, I don’t really mind that. Of course, if they go around telling others how their personal religious feelings ought to be, or worse yet, start fucking up the political system based on their personal religious feelings, or start justifying all sorts of horrible misogyny based on their personal religious feelings… well, that usually doesn’t happen with paintings.
I really like Van Gogh. Therefore, homosexual couples should not be allowed to get married.
Really?
Argument from personal experience?
One of the all-time classic logical fallacies?
One does not expect any better from HuffPo, so I can’t say I’m surprised.
True story: A number of years ago in our department coffee room, I asked the rhetorical question “What do you call an atheist who attends church.” A colleague instantly responded “The organist.” (Did I mention that the colleague was an organist at a high profile church?)
It seems to me that some people participate in religion for the same reason that they participate in quilting bees or knitting groups. That is, they use it as a social activity. And that was my take of Rabbi Lurie’s version of his religion.
We need to remember that religion isn’t the problem. It is fundamentalism that’s the problem.
Non-fundamentalist religion is just humanism with funny hats.
“We need to remember that religion isn’t the problem. It is fundamentalism that’s the problem.”
I disagree. There are plenty of non-fundamentalists who believe their god actually exists and has opinions about our behavior. I wouldn’t describe the pope as a fundamentalist, but he is definitely using religion for malevolent ends. The Mormons and Catholics who funded the Prop 8 campaign weren’t all fundamentalists, not by a long shot.
Yes, the problem is in viewing religion as anything beyond a social activity.
I remember listening to Rabbi Harold Kushner speaking on the radio just after the Interstate 35W bridge collapse in Minneapolis, where I live.
I’ll summarize his points: I [Kushner, throughout] don’t believe in an all-powerful God. If he were all-powerful, I’d say he should be doing a better job. I reject an all-powerful God. I find the strength to carry on in the face of tragedy in God. This strength must come from outside one’s self. I don’t believe in God having a master plan to which all actions adhere. When God created the world, he left in some randomness or chaos. God set the natural laws in motion and then left things go. Those that survive events such as the bridge collapse or the San Francisco [Mission District] earthquake are just lucky; it’s random chance. I was lucky to survive the San Francisco earthquake. Bad things are just nature acting in random ways. Luck is the residual chaos intentionally left in the universe by God. “God comes into action when people respond bravely to tragedy.” The event is just random nature.
Mr. Kushner is left with only the comfort of religious ritual and a deistic God that is indistinguishable from nature.
This is not the god of 99% of religious believers. Not the god that Sarah Palin or Glenn Beck is talking about. Not the god that Muslims pray to.
“This strength must come from outside one’s self”
Oh, it MUST, huh?
Even the reasonable believers make embarrassing cognitive errors.
The entire idea of faith, that people should believe things with no evidence or despite evidence, is the most corrosive religious idea. Fundamentalism is a goofy idea about where texts come from, but it’s the idea of faith which is the really harmful one.
And fundamentalism is made possible by the idea of faith.
Yeah, that’s the worst bit. Believing in improbable things with no supporting evidence is promoted as a virtue instead of the vice it actually is.
No, what we need to do is point out that the “good” qualities of religion (imparting morals, social bonding, etc.) have nothing to do with religion per se and encourage people to seek out alternatives. But taking those things and mixing them up with supernatural bullshit is always a bad idea, because the bullshit that gets a free ride with the other things will always be there under the surface waiting to rear its ugly head.
To be honest, I really loved doing church music and hated to let it go when I stopped going to church. I mean, where else do hobbyists get to sing classical music?
Unfortunately choir members have to sit (and occasionally stand) through all the religious bits that fall in between the music. As good as some of the music is, it’s just not worth all the other crap.
There are plenty of non-church choirs that sing the good religious music (the good music that happens to be religious) – and very few congregational hymns fall into that category.
“The rich man in his castle,
the poor man at his gate;
God made them high or lowly,
and ordered their estate.”
“Christian, dost thou see them on the holy ground,
How the powers of darkness rage thy steps around?
Christian, up and smite them, counting gain but loss,
In the strength that cometh by the holy cross.”
Lord^h^h^hFSM spare us! Even
“Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand
till we have built Jerusalem…”
is a terrible sentiment.
ATHEISTZ R ROBOTZ!!
Yeah that one really stuck out to me as well.
The rabbi is, as per usual, incorrect ants on jesus christ is a very emotionally uplifting experience provided by art.
With all due respect, rabbi, go fuck yourself.
You are saying, in essence, that those of us who do not believe in a deity have no capability to show gratitude, purpose, compassion and love.
Huh. I hadn’t heard that one before: “we can’t even agree if this art is beautiful or not, therefore god.”
Really, the rabbi is missing out on a simple 2-step argument for proving the existence of god.
Step 1: Show that people have subjective experiences of God. It seems we’ve accomplished that.
Step 2: Show that such experiences are veritable, and not just all in your head.
And then you’re done! 😀
I’m reminded of the South Park underpants gnomes’ plans. To adapt:
1. Show that people have subjective experiences of God.
2. ?
3. God. (or, in keeping with South Park, “Prophet.”)
Nice one.
Faith talk is the observational conscious brain modality attempting to give explanation to emotive unconscious acts and then, closing the loop, to claim that the explanation (aided by emotive reinforcement from the unconscious) is reflective of reality.
That’s my working definition anyway. In this sense, I don’t believe that faith actually exists but is simply an attempt to describe certain actions on the part of the inscrutable subconscious. As a Christian I had problems every time I tried to “exercise” faith consciously. Faith “worked” when I would let-go-and-let-God, or in other words, to let the subconscious get on with it with as little reasoned interference as possible.
Letting your subconsious get on with it with as little reasoned interference is useful for some tasks. When I’m playing guitar I sound a lot better if I just let my fingers (and part of my brain) do what they’ve learned how to do. It won’t give me any knowledge about reality, though.
I agree about guitar ;^)
I part ways here though. Almost all of our perception of reality is in the subconscious, available for the middle-level perceptions to access whenever we “pay attention” to it.
I’ve had many aha! moments in my lifetime. One thing I learned about such stuff rising up from the subconscious is that it is very often way off the mark. The subconscious emotive stamp of approval is best subjected to the skeptical process. This includes religious ‘inspiration’.
Rationality is like guitar practice 🙂
And yet, some time after writing that poem T. S. Eliot converted to Anglicanism.
Typical old “it’s a mystery”, wrapped up in, “if you feel it it’s true for you,” wrapped up in, “it’s true because people need the comfort.”
Das ist einem grossem Scheiss Haufen!
Just reverse the order of a couple of sentences and you see the mess he’s got himself into:
“…I am passionate about… helping bring others to an experience and relationship with God because I know that such a relationship can create powerful positive personal and communal transformation… I have no interest in proving the existence of God and certainly do not want to convert anyone to my religion or way of thinking.”
Does he blow so hot and cold with all his hobbies? Even stamp-collecting?
Rabbi Lurie:
The poor rabbi is awfully certain of the Universe’s intentions and our place in it while admitting he has no idea what he’s talking about.
Btw., the criteria art critics use to judge a painting can be subjective but the analysis follows logically.
But the fact is that there is widespread agreement in every culture as to which artists are important, and that Beethoven, say, is far superior as a musician to, say, the members of the latest squeaking Japanese boy-band… or, to compare things that are more like and while in the realm of Japan, comic books like ‘Akira’ or ‘Nausicaa’ are far superior to ‘Be-bop High School’ (a series about violent high-school boys). I grow tired of the trotting out of the hoary example of the impacted and un-impacted (sorry!) spectators standing before a painting in order to assert that aesthetic experience is ‘subjective’ and therefore arbitrary…
That’s the curious thing about this. He either believes an obviously bad argument, which is that if I have an emotional reaction to some idea, then the object of that idea exists. The experience is obviously real, but the object of that emotional reaction sometimes isn’t real. Lots of people reacted quite strongly to the characters in the Twilight novels. But no one thinks that Bella and Jacob exist. Our thoughts are intentional. They can have contents without anything in the world satisfying it.
Sorry, I forgot the “or” part. Which is that he could believe that having the emotional reaction just IS believing in God or “having faith”. Which would essentially make him an atheist, albeit an obscurantist one.
If our emotions about something can be taken to be connected to truths about existence, is there less likely to be a god if I have a very strong feeling there isn’t one?
I have a very strong feeling that I would be much happier if Julia Stiles was my girlfriend. This feeling obviously points to a reality outside myself.
And now I’m in jail on stalking charges.
“For human beings, God is the experience of a transformative relationship with creation itself, in which we know that the Universe is inherently meaningful, that we were created for a staggering purpose that will unfold over eons, that love and gratitude are the essential actual materials of our lives and that we are holy beings.
…
The experience of God expands the possibilities for our lives and increases the feeling of mystery and intellectual curiosity about the world.”
Wow, God sounds an awful lot like Salvia divinorum. Has anyone tried that stuff? It makes you feel holy as hell.
Yes, religious apologists often deliberately muddle the distinction between objective reality and subjective experience. Josh Rosenau has gone on record as stating that he doesn’t think the distinction is worth making:
That he can’t see the difference between something that’s true for him and something that’s true for everybody is unbelievable.
Yep. I certainly found it revealing.
Yeah, why should anyone else care about the rabbi’s subjective truths? He’s really saying he doesn’t give a shit about reality, he’s going with what makes him feel good. He may as well be a full time stoner. He has abandoned reality for pleasure.
Arguments for not arguing assume that there is so much of a gulf between someone who believes and someone who does not believe that persuasion is impossible. The rabbi is making a case for a God which is “felt” through the finest of emotions: if you approach the matter intellectually, you obviously lack fine emotions and there is nothing to be done. You are shallow and lack a sufficient capacity for gratitude, purpose, compassion, and love.
No offense intended, of course. Atheists shouldn’t take this the wrong way or anything. He really means it in the nicest way possible. Because he’s not talking to us. He’s talking to the believers — and it’s all *wink wink nod nod* when it comes to the atheists.
As far as I’m concerned this isn’t “better” than fundamentalism. At least the fundamentalists try to make an empirical case and think the atheists are making intellectual errors. Instead, this charming little rabbi thinks the atheists themselves are an emotional error. If there is so much positive significance placed on being a God-seeking sort of person — you can’t avoid placing a very negative significance on the people who aren’t.
Looks like there are two essential natures which divide humanity. One recognizes the source and ground of Cosmic Love; the other doesn’t.
But don’t make too big a deal of it. Because you’re in the “loving” group.
I’ve often thought that the anti-reason, anti-science, anti-humanist mindset can be summed up in this old quote:
“For those who believe, no evidence is necessary: for those who don’t believe, no evidence is possible.”
No argument. No persuasion. No convincing. Because there is no common ground. There’s no chain of evidence everyone can follow and come to consensus over. On the contrary. You either “know” or you don’t; you either feel things “deeply,” or you don’t; you’re either made out of the “right stuff,” or you’re not. We’re not similar flawed human beings seeking truth through empirical methods, trying to avoid being swayed by our biases. No, bias and prejudice and wishful thinking and subjective validation are all good things — as long as you call them “faith.”
And they think atheists insult them by not agreeing that faith is a fine thing.
There is a fundamental misconception at the heart of Rabbi Lurie’s Huffpo piece. It is simply this. The comparison of aesthetic experience (of a painting or a poem) with religious experience, the good rabbi fails to observe that whilst for the painting or the poem there is an objective correlate for the experiences — the poem or the painting — in the case of religious experience there is no such correlate. Or, if we take the universe itself as the correlate of religious experience, then religious experience must be able to accommodate an interpretation which does not include any reference to god.
We may differ about our response to a painting. For instance, I recall complaining to an art gallery curator about a painting that, to me, at least, looked like sludge. She responded by saying something to the effect that perhaps my response is exactly what the painter was aiming at.
I still disagree with her to this day, but at least we were speaking about something we could both see, and about which we could come to some agreement, even if only regarding the colours and the texture of the paint on the canvas. It was ‘out there’ and we could actually talk about what it was that we were responding to in very diffeent ways. The same goes for something like baseball. Not my favourite sport, and I know nothing about the finer points of baseball, though I do understand that many people do, and can talk about with great attention to detail, and to the art of the game. It too is ‘out there’ and there are some classic baseball players who define what it is to be a star at the game of baseball. And so on.
But ‘religious’ experience is very different. Lurie says hew wants to help people achieve a relationship with god (though somewhat inconsistently he tells us that he doesn’t want to convert anyone to his way of believing). But there is nothing ‘out there’. All we have, in the case of ‘religious’ experience is the experience itself, but we have no idea what it is ‘of’. (That’s the reason for putting ‘religious’ in scare quotes.) In fact, some people, like Sam Harris, are quite content with the experience itself, without supposing that it is about something. In fact, if you read Rudolf Otto’s Das Heilige, it is not clear that the experience of the numinous has an objective referent, although cearly he thinks of it as something transcendent. But in what sense transcendent? Transcendent in the sense that our imaginative conceptions transcend our own thought of them, so that others can think them too? Or transcendent in referring to something outside the self? I think the former.
If it is the former, however, then its interpretation in terms of gods or a god is very difficult. We can talk about our imaginative creations. Donald Duck is, or at least was, without any doubt, a real feature of popular culture, though merely an imaginary talking duck, and his image is iconic. But if, as Lurie says,
then god is too defined. If talking about god is like talking about our response to a painting, then we can’t define the god experience, if what we mean by god is some sort of relationship witht he universe. Even calling it ‘creation itself’ is already to go a step too far, for it begs the question. That’s like speaking of the experience of a particular painting in explicit terms, as though one person’s response could define what the experience of, say, Guernica, must be for everyone. The problem with Lurie’s idea about how we get to talk about god tries to define what everyone’s response must be to the universe, to reality as such. But this is something about which we can disagree. For many people the universe just doesn’t have a personal dimension, so that we could talk about its inherent purpose and meaning. But if his analogy with the experience of a painting holds good, we must be able to disagree about these things, in which case speaking about god is simply premature.
“God is the experience of a transformative relationship with creation itself, in which we know that the Universe is inherently meaningful, that we were created for a staggering purpose that will unfold over eons, that love and gratitude are the essential actual materials of our lives and that we are holy beings.”
Scene in ‘When Harrry Met Sally’ Meg Ryan’s character fakes a loud orgasm in a restaurant: lady at the next table tells the waiter, ‘I’ll have what she’s having.’
Curious to know if God or god always speaks to these lucky folk in English?
no, it’s not english. it’s an experience that completely transcends language, you are shown things and you instinctively understand them, it shortcuts dialogue.
If God is merely an experience, then he cannot be an entity who writes books and listens to prayers and cares about what we eat or whom we sleep with. Lurie is simply equivocating on the term “God,” emptying it of all the characteristics attributed by religious people (without which religion makes no sense), while still recommending a relationship with God (which somehow allows him to know that we were all created for some staggering purpose).
I hate to break it to you, Rabbi, but it seems that you’re stuck in a delusional relationship. You need to let go.
Please see my full critique here.