Maybe I’m overly concerned with Andrew Sullivan, but he seems to me a fascinating example of how and why an intelligent person accommodates the acceptance of science with the belief in fairy tales. And Sullivan documents his struggles publicly, which makes them fair game for analysis.
On yesterday’s “Ask Andrew Anything” feature at The Beast, a reader asks: What have been your most significant spiritual experiences? It’s a ten-minute cartoon video, and the link was sent to me by alert reader Sigmund, who also provided an astute analysis. Rather than reanalyze what Sullivan says here, I’ll just post Sigmund’s email to me (quoted with permission):
I think it is useful to watch to get a feeling of how he sees religion in his life but for the main part it will probably confirm your suspicions about him.
When I had previously wondered about Sullivan’s life story and his relationship to religion, I came to the conclusion that someone raised a Catholic who is gay and diagnosed HIV+ during a time when the disease was a death sentence, may have, in desperation, prayed to God for his life.
Sullivan’s luck is that he got the disease at just about the time effective HIV treatments were developed that extended the lives of HIV+ patients by decades. I suspect he sees it as a question of honor to uphold his promises to his God that ‘saved’ him.
He doesn’t quite put it in such stark terms in the video (talking of visions and voices speaking to him) but it’s fairly clear that this is the likely scenario and as such I doubt that we will ever get him to change his mind— he’s simply too emotionally bound up by the whole thing.
As for him being a ‘Catholic’— well, despite the fact that his version of the religion doesn’t in any way seem related to the official Vatican-approved version, it’s my experience amongst Catholics that his Catholicism IS close to that of educated Catholics – who, for the most part, have no problem with family planning, divorce, evolution, homosexuality etc.
It’s really a form of deism with the added guest appearance of a magical superhero called Jesus.
I think Sullivan is personally a lost cause but arguing with him is useful to expose the fallacy of his arguments to a larger audience.
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Subscribing.
That bit about “close to that of educated Catholics” reminds me of Roger Ebert’s review of Kevin Smith’s Dogma, in which he notes that said film is actually a pretty accurate rendition of the thinking you get from going through a parochial school.
My armchair psychoanalysis above comes off a little terse but I think this example of Sullivan’s faith exemplifies the all too common situation of a believer who is, to all intents and purposes, impossible to reason out of their religion.
Watching the video put me in mind of the pivotal scene in Graham Greenes ‘The End of the Affair”. A German bomb hits the house where the lovers are meeting, resulting in one of them, Sara, making a promise to God that she will end the affair if Bendrix survives – which he does. I don’t think any statistics or rational explanations of antiviral drug developments, protease inhibitors or combination treatments will shake Sullivans emotional view of what actually happened.
Neither, I suspect would pointing out the fact that almost all the many gay catholics who were diagnosed HIV+ a decade previously, and who had just as much faith as Sullivan, are all dead despite this faith, for the simple reason that medical science hadn’t yet come up with an effective treatment.
So who actually first said “You can’t reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into”?
Socrates? Plato? 🙂
Yes, Andrew Sullivan is, and will remain, simply impervious to any reasoning concerning religion, although he has defended Catholicism on the grounds that it provides rational reasons for faith.
I have posted before about Andrew, but basically his problem is that he is really afraid of dying.
It is also purely emotional. He linked to a ‘conversion’ story today, about some woman, but someone in the comments hit it right on the nose:
“Your decision appears to be a total emotionally driven one not an intellectual one as you claim. You didn’t like the reality of the world so you sought refuge in an emotional construct.
An intellectual review of the facts would you to the honest assessment that Christianity is, and always has been evil.
You can be a happy Christian if you ignore its core teachings. But that also makes you a deluded Christian.
Sorry, but getting to Christianity via CS Lewis is intellectual bankruptcy.
And reading all the weepy comments here certainly confirms this notion.”
Basically people can not handle the fact that we will be dead one day and that is the end of it for us. Enter religion…
Interesting analysis. Being emotionally tied-up in something really does cause a lot of difficult issues for us humans, in all sorts of domains – not just religion.
I’m glad that the gnu atheists generally try to present a humanistic alternative to the conclusions and outlooks of the religious worldview, because having no alternative is what makes some of these emotionally-held views so difficult to give up. I think it goes a long way to tell people “there is no god, and look at how wonderful life still is!”
Agreed. But more often “look at how wonderful life becomes!” I,e, rationality, secular morals, and letting go of the idea of an invisible tyrant pwner.
It’s not really the fault of materialism that religion promises a candy rainbow afterlife. Most of the people I’ve known who grew up without the promises of an afterlife are still intimidated by death, but not really disappointed in the same way that I felt realizing that heaven wasn’t going to happen.
I’d also say that the judgement aspect of some religious aspects makes them far worse than just life ending at death. That people are damned forever and given no chance to be redeemed, or evil people who repent properly get a free ride just seems worse than everyone getting the same neutral thing.
Sullivan … seems to me a fascinating example of how and why an intelligent person accommodates the acceptance of science with the belief in fairy tales … arguing with him is useful to expose the fallacy of his arguments to a larger audience
Yes. If Sullivan were not a public figure but a not-close friend or family member, I would most likely keep to myself opinions about his personal faith, especially knowing that they’re tied to personal challenges greater than ones than I’ve had to face. But countering transparently nonsensical views even in private is a measure of intellectual respect, even if those views arise from personal tragedies.
While listening to Sullivan talk about hallucinating while sick about “a very, very, vague visual sense” and “seeing without seeing” God, I googled the HIV-1 DNA sequence: tggaagggtt aatttactcc aagaaaaggc aagaaatcct …. Rather than confronting the basic truth of the rather simple, impersonal fact of his illness and its connection to the “\letters tggaagggtt aatttactcc aagaaaaggc aagaaatcct …, Sullivan instead seeks meaning from the very different but familiar letters of his childhood faith in the story of Mary, Martha, and Jesus.
Now how Mary, Martha, and Jesus have anything whatsoever to do with tggaagggtt aatttactcc aagaaaaggc aagaaatcct … I have no idea, but at this point it must be pointed out that this is a completely irrational connection, Sullivan’s protestations that he is rational notwithstanding.
I would say that those historical constructs, even if they were real, were much too old to connect with the SIV -> HIV transition in the 20th century.
Or, since we are on the Why Evolution Is True blog, the SIV -> HIV evolution. It’s true!
While it opens the door for ‘atheist, but culturally I’m catholic’ I don’t see much for ‘cultural catholicism’ to hang it;s hat on.
I think that is rather typical of people who fully accept science, yet try to maintain their religion. It’s about the only way to keep the two tolerably compatible.
Most moderate religious people really don’t think a lot about the tenets of their religions. It’s tradition and hope for the most part for them. They don’t ever wonder why an all-powerful, all-knowing God would even *require* anyone to worship Him. They just go to mass on Sundays anyways like it is an obligation. And they really really hope that when they die they get reunited again with their loved ones. Tradition and Hope, they are powerful things.
Yes. I never understood why THIS is what the creator of EVERYTHING would care about. Why is believing in him the ultimate criterion of your worth? Just how narcissistic can a god be? It’s not how you live, but whether you agree to play his believe-even-though-I-have-deliberately-denied-you-evidence-from-which-to-derive-belief game.
I have always taken the greek god perspective. Basically, the Christian god and this world we live in are nearly perfectly reconciled if you accept that god is just some bored immortal who likes to f*ck with mortals to pass the time.
David Heddle – a somewhat notorious (former) commenter on Pharyngula and Dispatches – once argued that worship isn’t for God’s sake, it’s for ours; i.e. it (apparently) makes those who do it feel good about themselves, hence why God demands it.
Prof. Heddle still occasionally comments on the Dispatches blog, along with the Evolution blog.
And recently, it seems he posted quite a lot on Jerry (and Eric) on his own blog.
Oh yeah, I remember that! So funny, “Worship me or else you’ll burn in HELL! and you’ll feel better” … Er what?
I think I remember that. Always reminds me of God as a cosmic Stalin (hmm, Ming the Merciless?)
What about Asclepius?
Andrew Sullivan is just tedious in his god-love rhetoric. If there were a god & she wanted to be loved & worshipped she might actually talk straight (not parabalical!) & in one voice.
I thought that “parabalical” was when theology professors took a semester off to think about reality instead.
Sorry, I couldn’t help myself.
🙂
Go on – no one minds!
PS Note that followers are edging up to 1,500!
Yes, it’s all about the size and location of one’s after-death apartment.
Coming to grips with the fact that there is no such a thing as an after-death state (other than decomposition) is, in my mind, one of the fundamental characteristics of a fully mature intellect. Seems like a lot of people are stuck in a post-juvenile state, and don’t really appreciate it when we call them on it.
Andrew: No kidding, there’ no such a thing as an after-death experience. When you die, that’s it. Everything you were goes away. Your atoms are redistributed back into the universe. Wishing really, really hard won’t change that; nor will eating a stale cracker every Sunday.
Get a grip. Grow up. There’s no pony under the manure.
The elephant in the room is that our consciousness is a dynamic construct, so the ‘we’ we experience is fairly unstable. (Ask those afflicted with some neuropathologies.)
Another Elephantidae is the observation that we construct our consciousness after our actions.
The Mammuthus would be that we loose consciousness on a daily basis. At least, if we want to remain healthy. Either during sleep or, it seems some research claims, under the appropriately named “little death” of orgasm.
I consider the third fact a good reason for myself not to fear death. Every once in a while I self-observably reconstitute my consciousness. What would convince me I am _not_ exactly the same? Say, forgetting some of yesterday.
So every day I experience extinction, I even strive to experience it as often as it pleases me. Why would the last one in a humongous set of mostly pleasant extinctions bother me? What would bother me would be to get unduly afraid.
I think religions really only function with a pretty middle of the road notion of mind and consciousness. They don’t really like thinking of the super geniuses that think their way out of the basic arguments religions put out, and they don’t like thinking about all the people that are born without the full emotional or cognitive faculties that most baseline humans are. Are their souls different? If so, why would God make people with broken souls, or better than average ones?
Religious notions of equality before god, and justice in the afterlife don’t make much sense when people’s minds aren’t just unequal, but sometimes incomprehensible. How does that survive meeting someone with schizophrenia, or autism, who couldn’t even understand the notions of religion at all?
I’m not looking forward to dying…everything I’ve seen tells me the process sucks and probably is accompanied by a fair amount of pain/discomfort. Frankly, the fact that we afford our superannuated cats better end-of-life care than we do ourselves is pretty troubling.
But the after-death? No. I don’t “fear” it. I expect it to be exactly as peaceful as my pre-life state. The Buddhist concept of “blessed nothingness” I think is more like reality than anything anyone else has envisioned. I think it’s quite clear that everyone goes “there” (Nirvana).
Certainly there’s no evidence whatsoever for a “heaven” nor a “hell”. How could there be? There’s no evidence for a “soul”. And quite a lot of evidence against such a thing. (I’ve done a lot of thinking about souls lately. The concept makes even less sense than other theological concepts — and that’s saying a LOT.)
The fact that Christians believe that the soul is created by humans (during the fusion of egg and sperm), and that the sole purpose of this lifetime is to have your soul sorted on the basis of what you thought of a specific deity during that lifetime, and that every other consideration is irrelevant to your thoughts about this deity, and on the basis of those thoughts (belief or not), your soul is sorted into buckets, one of which confers you eternal bless and other other eternal torture and there’s no way to change your mind once you’re provided with the evidence which can’t possibly happen until after you’re dead, and that the rest of the entire freaking universe and the 13.7 billion years when humans weren’t around and the few trillion years after the Earth and all life is consumed by our sun going red giant is also irrelevant to this one brief instant where human souls are sorted because god wants only souls that were harbored by a body that believed in a certain incantation of it without providing any decent evidence to prove that this incantation actually existed…well, if you can follow all that, you’re a better theist than I am.
Soul sorting — it’s the ultimate purpose of the universe. Egad, what nonsense.
The definition of Separative Work could rank the moral effectiveness of various universes in units of the soul-SWUs they could achieve.
What would the Deinotheriidae be?!
Sajanas, good point on different behaviors. And some of those people may not only not understand religion, they may not understand death or fear it. More problems for the religious.
Kevin, I hope I didn’t give the impression that it is rational to look forward to death. Even if we weren’t wired to avoid it and yes, fear it when faced with an imminent death, in a more rational view we would be denied more pleasures. (And there are more pleasures than having a sound sleep or good sex, believe it or not.)
Since I am facing extinction (i.e. too tired to think and ready to sleep), I’ll end there. But I will be back from this one!
Dominic, I am running out of rooms. Um, maybe that some animals have what looks like functions of consciousness too.
So what about that heaven (ceiling?) for cats? Or elephant relatives, so I know where to house them!
“some animals have what looks like functions of consciousness too” – yes! Hephalumps being one.
I need a photo opportunity
I want a shot at redemption
Don’t want to end up a cartoon
In a cartoon graveyard
+
you know, I don’t find this stuff amusing anymore.
Why would a benevolent god allow his beloved children contract HIV in the first place?
Why would a benevolent god create a world where such viruses exist?
Where do some fortunate people get the hubris to believe that their god favors them so much that their prsyers for healing were answered when so many such prayers go unanswered. Millions of prayers from the concentration camps went unheard but god intervened for Andrew Sullivan?
It’s a weird sort of sadomasochistic narcissism, isn’t it?
Quite right: An omniscient god knows the exact structure of a vaccine for HIV, but does nothing to administer it to his beloved children. Presumably to teach them a lesson in respect.
The more I think on it, the more people’s relationship with religion is “battered spouse syndrome” where the abused party has such an emotional attachment to the abuser that they excuse any behaviour. The victims also tend to blame themselves instead of the real culprit.
But we have to suffer it seems, because then we learn to love god, or sumfin’ like that.
Excellent metaphor. 😀
The only way that your “benevolent god” can act is through the benevolence of the people that exist at any time.
The world is indeed a cruel place in the absence of such benevolence.
This forum is a cruel place.
Andrew Sullivan received benevolence from the scientific community – the individuals who have done Good Works – they really have!
He accepts that benevolence with good grace.
Why be so cruel to him?
“…but arguing with him is useful to expose the fallacy of his arguments to a larger audience.”
Exposing idiotic beliefs is not cruelty, you silly person. Keeping mum out of “respect” for the person holding them, on the other hand…
@sasqwatch
in your “unbenevolent” haste to label “idiotic” and “silly” beliefs and this person – you cite a phrase I wrote not.
Perhaps you meant to quote:
“The world is indeed a cruel place in the absence of such benevolence.
This forum is a cruel place.”
I have to admit I’m getting really tired of the Andrew Sullivan posts on here. I like Andrew a lot even though he’s wrong about this, and I like Jerry a lot. This is starting to feel a lot like two college kids that don’t like each other. On the other hand I really liked the exchange with Sam Harris.
then don’t read them.
+1
“Thanks for your concern!”
Then just skip it Michael – or you are like those who carp on about TV programmes and cannot use the off switch. JAC writes about the things that interest or concern him as you must know. And, as I think is clear, Andrew Sullivan is a pain in the bum.
My sister in law is like this, if you ask questions about what she believes she doesn’t support any of the church’s views on practically anything. On the other hand she still smuggled an incognito priest to her father’s death bed to anoint him, in spite of the fact he had explicitly stated more than once that he didn’t want anything to do with priests any more. She clearly still believes in the magic spells and felt it was more important that he was conjured into the next world than that his wishes were respected. They spout lots of ‘sophisticated theology’ but in the end the they still believe in magic spells.
“she still smuggled an incognito priest to her father’s death bed to anoint him, in spite of the fact he had explicitly stated more than once that he didn’t want anything to do with priests any more.” Sounds like Brideshead Revisited. Did he move one hand vaguely in what could have been a cross?
…or perhaps just raise his middle finger in benediction?