A few days ago I posted about Tanya Luhrmann’s New York Times op-ed, “Belief Is the Least Part of Faith,” in which she claimed that belief, or the content of belief, wasn’t really important for evangelical religious people. Instead, what was important was the feelings of joy and communion people got from worship. Her thesis is encapsulated in one paragraph of her essay:
And that was not really what I saw after my years spending time in evangelical churches. I saw that people went to church to experience joy and to learn how to have more of it. These days I find that it is more helpful to think about faith as the questions people choose to focus on, rather than the propositions observers think they must hold.
I contested this essay on several grounds, primarily that the epistemic content of religion is critically important for many religious people. If they knew that Jesus didn’t exist, or was just a garden-variety apocalyptic prophet who wasn’t divine, how many people would be evangelicals? And if belief in propositions isn’t important, why do so many religions fracture on the grounds of doctrine, and do things like campaign against the teaching of evolution.
(I note in passing that, as reader Jeff D pointed out, Luhrmann got a Templeton Foundation grant for this work. As her Stanford c.v. notes: “2007: John Templeton Foundation grant, “Spiritual Disciplines and their Sensory Consequences.” This, I think went to help finance the work reported in Lurhmann’s book, When God Talks Back; and her work is Touted on Templeton’s website. She’s one of the prize horses in their stable.)
At any rate, yesterday the Times published four letters from readers about Luhrmann’s essay. I reproduce them all here (with my comments) because they’re interesting.
To the Editor:
Re “Belief Is the Least Part of Faith” (column, May 30):
T. M. Luhrmann got it right. As a Protestant pastor, I have come to believe that what we assert about God is of no real importance to that “being.” What ultimately matters is how we live and what we do with our lives.
Being in a religious community can be an enriching experience as well as a vehicle for service to those who are in need.
Spinoza said we should love God but not expect God to love us in return. We love God by caring for those less fortunate. That’s what matters.
(Rev.)
FRANK L. HOSS
Urbana, Ill., May 30, 2013
Well, maybe that’s what matters to Reverend Hoss, but how dare he say what matters to everyone else? Can’t he see is that his view is a personal one, and many religious people dissent from his claims that a. we shouldn’t expect God to love us, and b. Truth claims about God are irrelevant.
To the Editor:
Instead of accusing secularists of failing to understand the most elementary insight in the study of religion (Durkheim’s point that religion works as an adhesive for social solidarities), T. M. Luhrmann would do well to focus on why so many people affiliate with certain religiously defined groups and not others.
The growth of evangelical churches surely has something to do with the particular ideas that those churches proclaim and often protect from critical scrutiny.
DAVID A. HOLLINGER
Berkeley, Calif., May 30, 2013
The writer teaches religious history at the University of California, Berkeley, and is the author of “After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Protestant Liberalism in Modern American History.”
Here Hollinger has it right on the money. Remember that churches fracture on grounds like the existence of the Trinity, whether women should be preachers, how many wives are permitted, and whether the true descendants of the Prophet are his relatives or his companions. Very often these rest on epistemic claims, and on the moral claims that derive from them.
To the Editor:
One way of looking at religion is that it is a tool. Tools enhance our reach and make it easier for us to do tasks effectively.
Religion allays our existential anxiety and gives us hope. Even if some view it as illusory hope, it does soothe our distress in situations that would otherwise be hard for us to accept. It provides a sense of meaning and purpose, and a sense of belonging to a social group.
Just as mechanical tools can in turn influence our own development, religions shape the personalities of the people. Unfortunately, just as a knife can be used for constructive and destructive purposes, religion can be used in positive and negative ways.
One has to use this tool wisely.
RAMASWAMY VISWANATHAN
New Hyde Park, N.Y., May 31, 2013The writer, a psychiatrist, is a member of the Committee on Psychiatry and Religion, Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry.
Once again we see a writer arguing that the truth of religious claims simply doesn’t matter. I wonder if Viswanathan is religious, and, if so, whether he believes in the claims of his faith. But certainly as a psychiatrist, I doubt that he’d approve of his patients conditioning their behavior on a delusion than on reality.
To the Editor:
T. M. Luhrmann believes (that word again) that evangelicals go to church to find joy, which is certainly a wonderful thing, but I think that she’s being a bit naïve in that it seems as if many churches use their beliefs to hold themselves apart from other beliefs and to stand in judgment of them.
The “joy” that many of them seek, and I say this from personal experience, is the hope that the apocalypse will soon come and that all the “sinners” — people of different beliefs — will be destroyed.
If this is what brings joy, then the “reach for joy” is certainly tainted.
HENRY STROZIER
Brooklyn, May 30, 2013
This is true for many evangelicals, but it goes further than that. Many of them don’t just believe in the apocalypse, but in the equation of abortion with murder, the sinfulness of homosexuality, and so on. That may bring the believers joy, but it’s not so good for everyone else. Believing in things for bad reasons is, I think, always injurious in the end, for it enables one to ignore reality in many areas of life, gives one an unwarranted certainty about morality, and leads to divisions among different faiths. We can still have all the good stuff about religion without all the screwed-up and false beliefs. That’s called humanism. The only thing missing is the pretense that we’ll live on after we die.
Having known some family members who were deeply involved in an evangelical church, what I got from them is their abject abrogation of responsibility for their own lives.
This lasted until they became aware that their “beloved” pastor, a charismatic sort, was molesting their prepubescent daughters.
Everything changed after that, and not all for the good.
Belief in bullshit is awfully hard to challenge.
Do they still believe in bullshit? The same kind or different?
/@
In my contact with evangelicals, I’ve always been struck by the importance they assign to very specific points of doctrinal belief. For example, check out the Doctrinal Statement at William Lane Craig’s Biola University, a statement that I’m pretty sure all faculty and students there have to sign on to:
http://www.biola.edu/about/doctrinal-statement
It’s a welter of details, some of them horrifying (scroll down to the doctrines about hell).
“The only thing missing is the pretense that we’ll live on after we die.”
Maybe so, but it’s a major pretense…probably the single most animating feature of the religious impulse to begin with.
Agreed, but such a mindset can be changed, that it is OK to be mortal, that everyone else is, that our genes are passed on, while respect for/allegiance to religious beliefs hampers teaching ourselves how to deal with our mortality.
The joy comes from believing that Jesus died for their sins, God is in control and there is nothing they can’t handle, they will spend eternity with their Lord in heaven, and Jesus will return one day to rule the world. The joy of fellowship is in being surrounded by people who believe the same as they do. Worshipping together is a huge deal. But it absolutely all comes down to belief, and to suggest that belief is negligible is naive. Luhrmann needs to spend some time in an evangelical church. (All that said, I grew up evangelical, so that’s what “Christian” means to me, even now that I’m no longer religious. I can’t speak for the more “normal” churches.) I’ve even had several former Christian mentors tell me that I must have never truly believed because if I had, I never would have been able to turn away from God. I don’t know about the rest of the US, but here in the South, it’s a given that you believe 100% in God and all of the tenets you’d find on a typical church’s “We Believe” list.
I’ve heard Evangelicals say they feel real joy in their church but whenever I see evangelicals, jehovah witnesses, extremely devoted muslims, etc. they seem humorless and unhappy. I don’t know if it’s because they’re interacting with a world full of people like me (all unclean and atheistic in their eyes) or if they are so dogmatically constricted they don’t know how to feel joy anymore.
Hi, Diana – I think there’s a significant distinction between happiness and joy that needs to be clear. Joy occurs in the heart regardless of the situation, and is often not visible to the rest of the world. Happiness is tied to a specific time and/or event that is typically evident to others by way of laughter, smiling and such. I do, however agree that in the name of religion, far too many people carry a heavy yolk of duty and have lost the true point of their faith.
The trouble with religion is that it is not of God but of man, and man in his nature has a great ability to screw things up. Jesus didn’t teach people to go to church on Sunday. He taught people to go out into the world and care for each other. This, I think is where we’ve missed the boat. We look inwardly and pray to buildings and statues, and ignore what’s going on outside the church doors.
It’s no wonder the church in North America (for the most part) is in such a mess.
Unfortunately, the trouble with God is that God is also of man — which places this common excuse into the problem area itself.
That would be an Atheistic view of God, which would make the entire conversation about what is most significant about the faith/belief irrelevant.
The two must be connected – faith without belief is naive at best, and belief without faith is hollow and useless.
I have more respect for those who say there is no God than those who say there is, then do nothing about it.
I’m never going to understand…I understand it intellectually but as a life long atheist I can’t get the feeling part.
I’ve argued previously that there are people (and I think the majority of people) who are of the nature that they go on feelings and not thoughts. The don’t have a desire to understand and learn, they have a desire to feel…and anything that looks like learning is usually confirmation bias to support the feeling.
This is a big part of what keeps religion and woo alive.
The learning should be the ‘church’ part – the gathering of like-minded people. It’s not so much about just wanting to be around people who think like you do (which we all tend to do), it’s about exploring the ‘why’ of the Christian life, or Muslim life, or any other organized religion.
We need to recenter ourselves – kind of a barometer of our path of belief. It’s not important how far down the path you are, but that you aren’t where you started. My belief is an intellectual one more than anything else. Not understanding is a wonderful place to be, because you want to try to understand – imagine all those who close their eyes and simply believe because they were told so.
The first questions to ask the believer — the questions each believer must ask themselves — are these:
Does it matter more to you if your religion is true … or that it “works” for what you need it for? In other words, if God does not exist and never has existed, would you want to come to that conclusion? Would it make any difference to your religion?
I have more respect for those who say they’d drop their religion like a hot potato if they stopped believing that God was real than those who insist they wouldn’t want to find out and if they did it wouldn’t matter but sure, they love God with all their heart.
Yup – good points. I was always part of what I’d call a religious upbringing, but it was pretty much a superficial ritualistic thing (Easter and Christmas, etc.). I started to believe from an intellectual standpoint – I struggle with the whole ‘faith’ thing as well, but I’ve seen enough real proof to know that as supernatural as it seems, it really is the only thing that makes sense to me.
With that in mind, I agree that blind faith without real context is pretty shallow, and leaves the believer open to fail with any ripple in their faith system.
This conversation seems like this Cat & Dog cartoon about theology: http://www.etsy.com/listing/152953008/dogs-and-cats-argue-theology-print?ref=shop_home_active
“…we should love God but not expect God to love us in return. ”
Now that is a dysfunctional relationship if ever there was one. It’s a sort of humility that translates into something rather unwise if practiced in the real world with real authority figures.
I know it was said with the very best of intentions, but I don’t think that is good advice to give to anyone.
The statement makes sense if we substitute the term “nature” for “God.”
Given that most Christians (and many non-christians) harp on and on about how spirituality involves a relationship with God, switching back and forth between God-the-remote and God-the-Involved won’t work.
Paging Mr. B. Spinoza!
One way of looking at religion is that it is a tool. Tools enhance our reach and make it easier for us to do tasks effectively.
And now we’ve made better tools (like government to enforce rules and keep the society safe), science to figure out how the natural world works and other critical thinking skills to function within the world so we don’t need this religion tool anymore.
I have to wonder if the attitude expressed by the pastor is a way to accommodate growing secularism. Is secularism again forcing changes in attitude from the religious? I hope so – one step closer…
I suppose the NYT’s readership tends to run liberal and educated, which in this case is a pity because it would be nice to see a repudiation from an Evangelical informing her that, yes, believing in {list of doctrines} is vital, indeed it’s considered the basis for the happy-clappy joy aspect of faith. Kind of an Annie Hall moment ;-).
The 496 on-line comments to Prof. Luhrmann’s last essay did include a number of comments from Times readers who were former fervent or evangelical believers, and many of those comments made exactly the point that Eamon has made above: The content of the doctrines, and simple, straightforward belief in those doctrines (not just “faking it” in order to eat at the church supppers and cookouts) definitely matter to many of these sects.
Of course, if a closet atheist in the congregation, or a “fallen” believer-in-belief in the congregation, is determined to consistently and convincingly fake “simple, straightfoward belief,” it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish faked belief from the genuine article. If it were easy, Dennett and LaScola’s Clergy Project would not have had as many subjects as it has.
And if belief in propositions isn’t important, why do so many religions fracture on the grounds of doctrine, and do things like campaign against the teaching of evolution.
I think the answer to this question (sic) undermines Jerry’s argument. Religions splinter on doctrinal grounds and then new sects are formed (with variations on or complete overhauls of the doctrine). Since more and more spring into existence, doesn’t that suggest that the adherents aren’t as interested in doctrine as they are in being part of a church community? The ridiculously vast and diverse range of “beliefs” — even within one subset of the stupid like Protestantism — tells me the doctrine is secondary to whatever succor they get from the weekly ritual of screwing up a perfectly good Sunday.
Well, maybe that’s what matters to Reverend Hoss, but how dare he say what matters to everyone else?
Good question. How dare anyone say this?
I won’t speak for *everyone* else but I can speak about what matters to my gigantic Catholic family, and very little of it has to do with Catholic doctrine. They seem to like the warm fuzzies they get from talking to their imaginary friend and they seem to like communing with their Church buddies. I never hear anybody talking about whether they believe they are chowing down the real flesh of Jeebus or a symbol — and I don’t think any of them really give stuff like that much thought. I suppose the priests and nuns do, but they probably have other reasons for going to mass.
You reference the experience of your Catholic family. How many Catholic “denominations” are there compared to the 55 gallon drum-full of Protestant denominations?
Whatever else they may agree or disagree on, Methodists, Presbyterian, Lutheran and other non-Southern Baptists, e.g., apparently can live with “sprinkling,” whereas the Southern (“Southern” – Ha!) Baptist Church in which I grew up and was indoctrinated insist on total immersion. And there are various sects of Baptists (Southern, American, Northern, “Primitive” – even a so-called “Hard Shell” Baptist, which in a certain minor epic poem – likely written by a Baptist – Jonah is alleged to have offered to God justifying his refusal to go to Nineveh to preach. I.e., he didn’t believe in “foreign” [versus “home”] missions).
From my experience, John 3:16 says it all for at least all evangelical denominations and, if it’s not true, all else is in vain.
Having been a god-botherer of the evangelical persuasion for a large part of my life, and more recently decided that embracing reality was a more satisfying way of living, I can agree in part with Luhrman’s position. Religion is largely a modern version of tribalism. People want to feel part of a group, and that can be supporting a football team, going to church, or being part of a music subculture like punks or goths.
The truthfulness of the belief systems is not exactly unimportant to believers – but it is subconsciously shielded from close examination, because disbelief would either mean uncomfortable cognitive dissonance, or disassociating oneself from the group, and losing the benefits such as the support of a community, joy, justification for prejudices etc. So while the believer definitely believes, and the belief system needs to be internally consistent, the wider truthfulness of the belief system isn’t as much of a concern. Believers don’t generally worry themselves about trivialities such as “Is what I believe actually true?”.
I think people also to a certain degree pick a church, or version of their religion that aligns with their personality and upbringing. If you are or have been raised to be homophobic, or xenophobic, you’re probably going to go to a more conservative church that preaches what you want to hear. There’s a whole lot of confirmation bias going on, and I think that’s largely why you get so many variations of Christianity.
Once you have a belief structure that is internally consistent, which I think Christianity and other religions largely are (which is why apologetics exist – not to covert sceptics, but to explain away anything that might be pointed out as inconsistent), and you have the benefits of being part of a group, and you’ve got a church (or mosque or whatever) that preaches what you want to believe, then it’s vital to shield that belief from criticism. And that’s where the whole inflicting your beliefs on others comes into play. If you can gather like minded people around you, and place yourself in the majority by conflating other’s beliefs to be the same as yours (cue “America is a Christian nation rhetoric”) then it’s quite hard for anything external to assail those beliefs.
In short, herd mentality.
So while the believer definitely believes, and the belief system needs to be internally consistent, the wider truthfulness of the belief system isn’t as much of a concern. Believers don’t generally worry themselves about trivialities such as “Is what I believe actually true?”
Is that in fact belief, then, or something else, such as “taking sides” or just declaring yourself a member of a group? Isn’t there something odd, even conceptually confused, about saying “I believe it, but I don’t care if it’s true”?
Reminds me of the Mark Twain saying:
“Faith is believing in something you know ain’t so.”
I think the brain has an amazing ability to compartmentalise things – something can be believed absolutely to be true, but because that belief is vital to remaining within the group it is subconsciously firewalled. It’s totally a “don’t confuse me with the facts” type of existence.
My character is such that I need to understand things. I work in IT and have a degree in mathematics and (I think) quite a logical approach to everything. Even so, I maintained belief for around 28 years of my life until an emotionally traumatic part of my life caused me to question whether a god was listening to my prayers or had any kind of effectiveness in my life. It was only then that I really considered evidence contrary to my position. Prior to that I was fascinated by apologetics, Creation “science” and so on. I would investigate contradictions that were thrown at me, and find out why they weren’t in fact contradictory, and if I couldn’t I would never consider my belief to be incorrect – merely that my knowledge on that subject was insufficient and the facts would eventually bear me out.
I think it’s similar in many respects to the thought processes of conspiracy theorists. They might have a particular anti-government mindset, and only information that confirms that bias is going to be accepted, and contrary information is discarded as people merely parroting “what the government wants you to believe.” Or “don’t believe everything you hear – the government controls all the media.” It’s damn hard to break through such a mindset.
==> “I would investigate contradictions that were thrown at me, and find out why they weren’t in fact contradictory, and if I couldn’t I would never consider my belief to be incorrect – merely that my knowledge on that subject was insufficient and the facts would eventually bear me out.”
This was my experience, as well. Thanks for saying it so clearly.
As another ex-evangelical, I think this is an important point, and probably constitutes the part of Luhrman’s thesis that’s not entirely wrong.
Probably very few people set out to determine what is true in a vacuum, and reason their way through to something like evangelical/fundamentalist Christianity. For one thing, only certain temperaments are that interested in truth for its own sake, and of course, Christianity is an unlikely end point of such a process. (Though no doubt a few do — my younger self arguably qualifies — as human reason is far from infallible). More common are people who were raised in that tradition, or converted from another Christian sect, possibly under the influence of friendship.
But as Ralph says, at that point it becomes an issue of tribalism — continuing acceptance by the group requires being able to recite the creedal shibboleths, without consciously lying to oneself or one’s friends. Publicly proclaiming absurdities is a form of costly signalling, as Dennett calls it.
Yes, it’s a social/emotional trip, but it’s backstopped by the belief system.
+1
Ralph here raise an important point. From my experience, religions means something like that to most of the adherents. A kind of modern tribalism. The ‘non-essentials’ are actually the main issue. The feeling of belonging to a group (especially a strong one), ability to have clear (undebatable) rituals, somethings to fight for.
It is closer to sport hooliganism, of course in a much positive social light (while actually may be worse than actual sport hooligans).
It explains why they are immune (or more like actively creating barriers) to critics of their tenets (MU fans?). Agressive whenever they can, partly to show off to other fan base, and worse, to enbolden own ‘faith’.
So, there are things that we need to learn about this mammals called humans, they are definitely built for science or logic, they are driven by evolutionary biologica, sociologigal and psychological game of costs and benefits.
Religion is a wholesale approach to those game, exactly like political and sport fanaticism and others (with benefits, not just tax, but also social positive light).
These issues are not central to any logical debates of atheism and goddism, but it is the actual issues faced by the mammals that was religious humans. Scientists may or may not interested to learn about these, but it is definitely there.
These homo-religiositus are not exactly logical, but they are not stupid, they gain benefits from these illogical actions, and that is exactly what evolution is, anything that benefits more than its cost is a good thing.
I myself is not a religious person, but looking at those homo-religiositus as stupid or (gasp) primitive is as shallow as saying that dogs are stupid because they only bark.
What we need is a proper sociological study of these evolutionary cost-benefits of being religious to differing individuals. And I am sure that these people for eons believe in something invisible because there are real benefits in doing so (within local and temporal context of course, as with any evolutionary studies).
With current technological levels those cost-benefits may or may not change, but definitely within previous millenia up to last decade or so (or even still going on now in many places) being religious has its real evolutionary benefits. And that is the main reason why people were and are religious.
It will be good to clarify these issues in the next few years (I am sure we will).
Annoying missing NOT: ..they are definitely NOT built for science or logic …
I think a distinction needs to be drawn between what someone would intellectually claim is the reason for their belief and what the real reason is. If someone claimed that the intellectual content of the belief was the most important, and you took away the social aspect, how many of them would, long term, remain strong in their beliefs? I bet precious few.
Luhrman is both right and wrong about the function of “belief”. I’ve come to see a lot of religious belief to really be in the realm of Dennett’s belief in belief. That is, people believe stuff (not just in the religious sphere) because the people that they associate with or want to associate with most believe in it. So in a sense by asserting that Jesus is god, or some other fact, they are in essence saying that they belong to a particular tribe. The tribe asserts that some position or buzzword being essential for membership in that tribe, and it then becomes virtuous to believe in that position.
Our cognition is mostly used for social activity, not intellectual activity. Intelligence probably came about because battles between social groupings — politics — is an extension of war by other means, and arguments are soldiers. The danger is that once you know which side you’re on you have to support all arguments for that side and attack any positions that are against your side; saying that the other side has a good argument is like stabbing your fellow soldiers in the back.
So faith is not belief but rather that good feeling you get when meeting with like minded people? Has anyone informed Websters?
Man, the games some people play with words.
You mean like also saying Christianity is a “philosophy”?
http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2012/12/05/bill-oreilly-christianity-is-not-a-religion-but-a-philosophy/
Of course, if they are influential enough, they will be (made) right.
“People don’t really believe that religious garbage; they’re only there for the personal benefits.”
Rephrase Luhrmann’s main point and pronounce the result with a certain level of scorn and contempt and the Friend-of-Religion turns into Religion’s-Worst-Nightmare. Apparently, what atheists actually say doesn’t matter near as much as HOW we say it.
Make it sound like you approve; make it sound like you admire; make it sound like you sympathize and will thus tenderly refrain from asking uncomfortable questions … and you can get away with bloody murder in your criticism of religion. By removing the entire focus on God’s actual existence and placing it on how simply wonderful it is to be “religious” and “have faith” Luhrmann is casting slurs on people’s deepest beliefs. Nobody really believes that shi … the propositions observers think they must hold.
And they don’t care. Because 1.) they’re being appreciated and 2.) they won’t have to defend their indefensible claims. Flattery — and forbearance — will get you anywhere, I guess.
You have pretty much isolated the formula with which an entire obscurantist cottage industry feeds at the Templeton (and similar foundations) trough and on the reason-deprived sycophancy of the “belief in belief” crowd.
Just to name a few: the insufferable Karen Armstrong. Then there’s an entire nationwide (240 stations) radio-show on NPR named On Being (formerly Speaking of Faith) whose host, Krista Tippett, gets away with basing a show on public radio on the following tenets:
“Firstly, although religious people obviously do evil things, religion inspires far more good than evil; secondly, a religion should be interpreted and judged not by its extremists, a minority who practice “a radically superficial” and literalist version of their faith, but by its moderates who compose a significant majority; and thirdly, because every religion provides to its followers a genuine path to the truth for them, all of us need to respect and value religions other than our own.”
Note the complete indifference to the objective truth content of religion’s teachings.
What would you say the “personal benefits” of Christianity are?
More crackers then would otherwise be available to eat. Not as explicitly tangible, ingroup rewards such as access to jobs, housing. Other things that I’m currently thinking of wouldn’t be exclusively beneficial, only because of christianity, but could apply to other formal groups.
So, lots of crackers, undeserved privileged tax benefits and status. Oh, benefits associated with ready access to people that are susceptible to delusion – access to jobs from the other side.
Joy? In evangelical churches? Get more joy out of shooting up heroin, I should think.
Years back, we were host to the leader of a visiting Cook Islands dance group, over here for fund-raising. These groups are always sponsored by churches, but their dancing – think of it as the hula on steroids – can be very suggestive. Somehow since it’s ‘traditional’ the churches don’t notice the disconnect.
Anyway, one miserable night they were invited to visit an evangelical church. They didn’t perform, by request of the hosts, instead everyone sat round in a circle saying how joyful they were. “Are we having fun yet?” came to mind. I’d rather visit my dentist.
Okay, anecdotal sample of one.
(The following week they performed at a catholic church and the place was jumping. I knew it would be).
It is surprising to me how many think christians are just saying they believe but not actually believing. While I’m sure some do, it doesn’t explain their willingness to accept and actively encourage the degradation of the environment and social structures as a way to bring about the return of The One That Does His Nails. And other behaviors that demonstrate or point toward actual belief.
It is a sin for them to question their belief, as I suspect the creators (human of course) realized would occur. So I think often when a believer finds themselves questioning their belief they have a sudden attack of anxiety as they fear they might anger their god, thus keeping them from continuing that thought process. Which would feed the continuance of the belief as a training of the mind to avoid the anxiety. It is common for the christians to attempted to use fear to convince me that their gods are present. Fear is a tool in the box of the christian.
I’m certain that some portion of the christian population, maybe weighted more heavily toward those in positions of power, don’t believe but realize that they can use the belief of others as a means to manipulate and bind them. Not likely a large portion of the christian population though.
I read Luhrmann’s book when it first came out, and to me the most significant portion (and forgive me if this has already been discussed; I read through a good number of the comments, but must admit I did not read them all)is that in which she suggests that the religious experience can be replicated artificially. When I run into evangelicals, pentecotalists, and others of similar stripe, it seems to me that their beliefs are indeed important. But if you ask them why they believe in God, they don’t turn, for example, to Natural Theology — they have probably never heard of Thomas Aquinas. Of course, many of them will quote scripture. But in my experience, the majority will talk about religious experience — in their parlance, “having Jesus in their heart,” or something similar. But Luhrmann suggests in her book that modern evangelicals have inadvertently stumbled on some very ancient meditation techniques, also employed by Buddhists and others. And these techniques are able to lead to changes in brain states, which can be explained in completely naturalistic terms, no woo involved. In her book, she discusses an “experiment” (I use quotes here because for it to be truly scientific it would have to involve larger numbers of test subjects and of course replication would be necessary), in which one group engaged in a form of meditation involving an attempt to empty the mind; another group would read passages from the Bible and imagine themselves in the “scene” — what would it look like from the perspectives of the various characters and the like — and to intensely focus on these stories. The control group watched Teaching Company videos about the New Testament. I don’t have her book at hand, but the group that psychologically enterred and focused on different biblical stories reported more “religious experiences” than did the other meditation group, and of course far more than the control group. Luhrman indicates that the Christians she observed had to work very hard to have a “religious experience” — it did not just come out of the blue. To me, this is good evidence that what is really going on is that something physical in the brain is being changed through hard work and concentration, and this explains the so-called religious experience so important to evangelicals and others. If God were really doing this, one would expect different results. What does everyone think?
Isn’t the “experiment” baiting the response?
If a group is exposed to video or narration about apples and pies, then told to think about apples and pies, wouldn’t they be likelier to have apple pie experiences than someone that was told to empty their mind.
I don’t disagree with your assessment, though I think that the christian would object saying that the gods intend the effort to be work hard or something similar.
Well, maybe there is some “baiting” taking place, although the control group that watched Teaching Company videos were presumably thinking about the proverbial “apple” as well. So I don’t know.
I definitely agree that a Christian would argue that God expects hard work, or something similar. As one of my professors used to like to say, “self-deception knows no limits.”
OK, but I’m wondering if the active focusing wouldn’t naturally produce more hits than passive watching. Wouldn’t the active focusing be exercising, more closely, the same brain functions that could also produce “religious experiences”?
Yes, and I think that’s the point. Religious people who are devout and spend a lot of time “meditating” in certain ways are causing changes in their brains (the amount of neurotransmitters or whatever — I am not a neuroscientist), and the fact that people involved in such practices seems to be a good case for a completely naturalistic explanation. If someone was, say, playing tennis, and in the middle of a match had a “road to Damascus” experience, and if this sort of experience was commonplace, that would seem to comport more with a supernatural explanation. But the level of work involved in achieving one of these experiences, though it does not disprove the supernatural, seems at least mildly suggestive that what is happening is completely natural, at least to me.
I think you can probably create a pretty sophisticated Venn diagram that would describe just how much belief does and does not matter.
My (still believing) mother had this conversation with my also-Christian cousin — who changes churches at the drop of a hat. “Well, it doesn’t matter as long as you believe in something“…
However, she didn’t really mean that. For example, if that cousin had decided to become a Hare Krishna, or a Muslim, or even a Roman Catholic…that would have been a problem.
For Protestants, the Venn diagram includes most but not all of the Protestant sects. For Catholics, I think the Orthodox churches are more likely to be inside the “doesn’t matter” bubble than those of most Protestant sects.
For Christians as a whole, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and pretty much every other “ism” there is falls outside of the bubble in which a specific belief/church teaching “doesn’t matter”.
And, I suspect if there were such a thing as “liberal” Islam, it would be the same thing. Sunni, Sufi..whatever, doesn’t matter as long as you believe — until you decide to join a Christian church. Then, it matters.
i’m not all that jazzed to read her book now.
Thanks for doing this,
Luhrman has become almost a cottage industry of circumventing the intellectual side of religion to trumpet the experience of folks…..
I suspect what’s behind it is a Herculean task that I failed as an underclass philosophy student, to find a way to preserve my evangelical faith and my learnings in philosophy, logic, history, et al….
Luhrman I suspect is all about how to be an intellectual and enjoy traditional Christian beliefs. Just a guess.