Category: spirituality

When good skeptics go bad: Isaac Chotiner interviews Barbara Ehrenreich about her mystical experiences

April 22, 2014 • 5:53 am

Barbara Ehrenreich has written 14 books, many of them on the economic difficulties of average Americans or the role of women in history, and I’ve read (and enjoyed) two of them: Nickled and Dimed and (especially) Bright Sided: How Positive Thinking is Undermining America. She’s always seemed to me rational and level-headed, but that was until her latest book came out, Living with a Wild God: A Nonbeliever’s Search for the Truth About Everything. Judging from her prepublication interviews, and now a personal interview with Isaac Chotiner of The New Republic, it looks as if this is her attempt to become the Thomas Nagel of autobiography: an affirmation that there is Something Out There beyond naturalism.

In a previous post, I described Ehrenreich’s mystical moment that she experienced as a teenager (the subject of a piece she wrote for The New York Times), seeing the whole world suddenly take on a lovely flame-like appearance. Rather than attribute it to the exhaustion and hypoglycemia she had from skiing, she chose to see it as something numinous—a reflection of a higher plane of reality and consciousness. And that’s the theme she’s pursuing in her new book. Its summary on Amazon includes this:

Barbara Ehrenreich is one of the most important thinkers of our time. Educated as a scientist, she is an author, journalist, activist, and advocate for social justice. In LIVING WITH A WILD GOD, she recounts her quest-beginning in childhood-to find “the Truth” about the universe and everything else: What’s really going on? Why are we here? In middle age, she rediscovered the journal she had kept during her tumultuous adolescence, which records an event so strange, so cataclysmic, that she had never, in all the intervening years, written or spoken about it to anyone. It was the kind of event that people call a “mystical experience”-and, to a steadfast atheist and rationalist, nothing less than shattering.

In LIVING WITH A WILD GOD, Ehrenreich reconstructs her childhood mission, bringing an older woman’s wry and erudite perspective to a young girl’s impassioned obsession with the questions that, at one point or another, torment us all. The result is both deeply personal and cosmically sweeping-a searing memoir and a profound reflection on science, religion, and the human condition. . . .

It sounds bizarre, as did her NYT piece, and my suspicions that all is not well are reinforced by yesterday’s interview of Ehrenreich by Isaac Chotiner, “Barbara Ehrenrich: I’m an atheist, but don’t rule out ‘mystical experiences’.” Go read it: it’s short, very strange, and, at times, almost incoherent on Ehrenreich’s part. The strange thing is that, as an atheist, she is absolutely sure that there is no God, yet at the same time she’s convinced that her personal experience with the numinous points not to some glitch in her brain (as she thinks the religious have), but to something real about the universe beyond the ken of science. A brief excerpt will suffice:

IC: It’s interesting that you call yourself an atheist rather than an agnostic.

BE: I am insistent on atheist. If we are talking about a monotheistic, benevolent God, I know there is no such thing.

IC: How do you know that there is no benevolent God when you think there might be spirits talking to me?

BE: It depends on what I have experienced. I have many areas of experience which show there is no giant benevolent force.

IC: But some people claim to experience a monotheistic God.

BE: That is not my experience.

IC: But we don’t make these grand judgments based on our own experience. [Pause] Do we?

BE: Yeah.

IC: We do?

BE: To an extent. Where is the evidence for a benevolent God?

IC: I agree with you. But there isn’t evidence for spiritual figures in the room either.

BE: Well, we need to find out.

Granted, this was a phone interview, and perhaps Ehrenreich wasn’t at her most eloquent. Nevertheless, the fact that she’d write a book on this—one that reminds me a bit of Marilynne Robinson’s strange antimaterialistic and pro-religious Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self —is just weird. I don’t know what to make of it, but if anyone reads it, send a report.

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Oh, and one more thing. If Ehrenreich is an atheist, why does she sneak the word “God” into the title? I suppose that that, combined with an atheist’s claim for the transcendent, will help the book sell briskly.

Barbara Ehrenreich had a vision, suspects it may reflect realities beyond our ken

April 7, 2014 • 10:51 am

Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941) is a very good writer, an atheist, and someone who seems eminently sensible. I was surprised, then, to see her piece in Sunday’s New York Times, “A rationalist’s mystical moment,” describing a shattering spiritual experience she had.

That experience occurred to in Lone Pine, California, the most beautiful town in the Owens Valley, flanked to the west by the near-vertical rise of the Sierra Nevada, and to the east by the barren deserts leading to Death Valley. I’ve spent a lot of time there, and it’s a good place for a “spiritual” moment, if you construe that misused word as “deeply moving.”

But Ehrenreich’s experience was far more intense:

Thanks to a severely underfunded and poorly planned skiing trip, I was sleep-deprived and probably hypoglycemic that morning in 1959 when I stepped out alone, walked into the streets of Lone Pine, Calif., and saw the world — the mountains, the sky, the low scattered buildings — suddenly flame into life.

There were no visions, no prophetic voices or visits by totemic animals, just this blazing everywhere. Something poured into me and I poured out into it. This was not the passive beatific merger with “the All,” as promised by the Eastern mystics. It was a furious encounter with a living substance that was coming at me through all things at once, too vast and violent to hold on to, too heartbreakingly beautiful to let go of.  It seemed to me that whether you start as a twig or a gorgeous tapestry, you will be recruited into the flame and made indistinguishable from the rest of the blaze. I felt ecstatic and somehow completed, but also shattered.

Well, I’d ascribe that to some physiological reaction, as Ehrenreich suggests, but she suggests that it indicated something numinous—something out there that was real:

An alternative to the insanity explanation would be that such experiences do represent some sort of encounter. It was my scientific training, oddly enough, that eventually nudged me to consider this possibility. Sometime in middle age, when I had become a writer and amateur historian, I decided that the insanity explanation may have been a cop-out, that I could have seen something that morning in Lone Pine.

If mystical experiences represent some sort of an encounter, as they have commonly been described, is it possible to find out what they are encounters with? Science could continue to dismiss mystical experiences as mental phenomena, internal to ourselves, but the merest chance that they may represent some sort of contact or encounter justifies investigation. We need more data and more subjective accounts. But we also need a neuroscience bold enough to go beyond the observation that we are “wired” for transcendent experience; the real challenge is to figure out what happens when those wires connect. Is science ready to take on the search for the source of our most uncanny experiences?

Science, I think, has always been ready to “take on the search for the source of our most uncanny experiences,” and we already know the source for some of them: mental illness, drugs, the power of suggestion, a trance-like state induced by meditation, and so on. What we don’t need is simply more subjective accounts, but more neuroscience.  And, indeed, if there were something transcendent that produces these experiences, presumably science would be interested in it. Perhaps, as Jeffrey Kripal suggested, our brains are radios picking up spiritual signals coming from other brains. And perhaps those brains are in dead people. Well, we could test that, by looking for reliable information from the dead, or even for evidence of ESP or other forms of inter-mind connections.  Yes, those could be tested, and have been. And they’ve shown no evidence for a non-natural, non-material source of our “uncanny experiences.” Still, we can’t rule them out completely, but, after so many searches, one reaches a point of diminishing returns, and loses enthusiasm for that search.

Ehrenreich continues:

Fortunately, science itself has been changing. It was simply overwhelmed by the empirical evidence, starting with quantum mechanics and the realization that even the most austere vacuum is a happening place, bursting with possibility and giving birth to bits of something, even if they’re only fleeting particles of matter and antimatter. Without invoking anything supernatural, we may be ready to acknowledge that we are not, after all, alone in the universe. There is no evidence for a God or gods, least of all caring ones, but our mystical experiences give us tantalizing glimpses of other forms of consciousness, which may be beings of some kind, ordinarily invisible to us and our instruments. Or it could be that the universe is itself pulsing with a kind of life, and capable of bursting into something that looks to us momentarily like the flame.

Or it could have been sleeplessness and hypoglycemia.

I’ll be very interested to see how Sam Harris’s new book, Waking Up: a Guide to Spirituality without Religion (coming out on Sept 9.) deals with such experiences. I’m hoping he’ll discuss Ehrenreich’s piece on his website.

h/t: Merilee

In chat with Diana Nyad, Oprah Winfrey channels Krista Tippett

October 16, 2013 • 9:54 am

Is it any surprise that Oprah Winfrey is a sucker for faith? She’s pitched all kinds of woo on her show, and although I know she’s done some great charity work, gotten people to read books, and done other useful things, I could never watch her for more than five minutes.  She was just too earnest, too saccharine—too eager to show the world that she was its nicest inhabitant.

Oprah’s most cloying aspects, a least vis-à-vis faith, are on tap in the following four-minute interview with athlete Diana Nyad, who recently swam from Cuba to Florida—at the age of 64!

As you’ll hear below, Nyad admits that she’s “not a God person” and is in fact an atheist. Sadly, she also says, “My definition of God is humanity—and the love of humanity,” which sort of spoils her admission. Why, if you’re an atheist, must you to give the name “God” to anything? It’s a sop to the faithful. And Oprah snaps it up, telling Nyad that because of her spirituality she must not be an atheist after all.

The video:

Here’s part of the transcript from Dave Niose, in a piece at Psychology Today called “Why Oprah’s anti-atheist bias hurts so much”: 

In the interview [Winfrey] is chatting with endurance swimmer Diana Nyad, who recently swam from Cuba to Florida at age 64. Nyad unhesitatingly identifies as an atheist when asked about her beliefs, then adds that she sees no contradiction between her atheism and her ability to experience awe, or in her words to “weep with the beauty of this universe and be moved by all of humanity.”

Oprah, however, apparently found this description unsettling, for it seems that in her view atheists must be cold, emotionless rationalists. “Well I don’t call you an atheist then,” Oprah responded to Nyad’s disclosure. “I think if you believe in the awe and the wonder and the mystery, then that is what God is.”

But note that that’s what Nyad herself calls “God”! Oprah also finds solace in Nyad’s admission that she, Nyad, is a spiritual person, and snaps at that bait as an admission of religiosity. Nyad finally claims, despite being an atheist, that humans have souls that live on after their deaths—souls created by “energy”—despite the fact that the body “goes back to ash.”

But what Niose chooses to kvetch about is Oprah’s marginalization of atheists:

What is most alarming about Oprah’s revelation is that she doesn’t even realize its invidiousness. Atheists, to her, don’t feel that deep, emotional connection to the universe. She has drawn a circle that includes people of all faiths, but excludes atheists, thereby confirming negative attitudes toward nonbelievers.

To those among Oprah’s legion of loyal viewers who may have held anti-atheist prejudices, this now validates their bias. That’s right, those atheists just aren’t like the rest of us, they can now say, nodding their heads.While we religious people of the world are appreciating the wonder and awe of life, those atheists are just one big buzzkill!

. . . Oprah, exalted by so many but oblivious to the fact that she is dehumanizing atheists, does more to perpetuate negative attitudes toward nonbelievers than Pat Robertson or James Dobson ever could. The general public takes comments from Robertson and Dobson with a grain of salt – but Oprah, as a media tycoon and a beloved celebrity whose opinions are taken seriously by millions, has just confirmed that atheists are “the other,” outsiders who just don’t belong in the in-group. (And the evidence is clear that atheists are indeed widely, and wrongly, scorned in America. With commentary such as Oprah’s, we can see why.)

This gets it exactly backwards.  What prejudiced viewers will really say after hearing this interview is “That’s right, those atheists are exactly like the rest of us—they, too believe in God. They just give Him another name.”

In truth, I think that more damage to atheism was done here by Nyad, eloquent though she was, than by Oprah. After all, Winfrey makes just one short claim about the issue, denying that Nyad is an atheist because she believes in wonder, awe, and humanity.  In contrast, Nyad calls those feelings “God”, admits the existence of souls that exist after death, and says that she has no problem with believers, even those who accept the existence of ghosts. In other words, she’s an atheist who, like Oprah, accepts woo.

It’s really time for us to discard the word “spirituality.” All it does is give believers a reason to say, “See, you’re really one of us after all.” The never-ending series of Templeton-funded papers by Elaine Ecklund, which implicitly equate spirituality with religiosity, testify to the invidious nature of this confusion.

Let the word “spiritual” be reserved for the faithful. Why can’t we atheists just say that we’re “moved” or “in awe” or “deeply touched” by sunsets, music, and scientific discoveries?

I much admire Nyad for her athletic prowess, her open lesbianism, and now her overt atheism. But I still prefer the honest anti-religious invective of a Christopher Hitchens to the numinous gushings of Diana Nyad.

Tanya Luhrmann recommends prayer for atheists

August 4, 2013 • 8:59 am

Shades of Alain de Botton!  First we’re told, as atheists, that we need churches; now Tanya Luhrmann, in a post today’s New York Times, “Addicted to prayer“, tells us that atheists need prayers, too. And she’s not just talking about the physical and mental benefits of meditation: she suggests invoking an imaginary, non-existent God to whom we should pray.

We’ve met Luhrmann before. She’s currently the darling of the “atheist-but” crowd after her recent book, When God Talks Back, about an evangelic Christian sect, became a best seller (see my reviews here and here).   Since then, Luhrmann’s been writing op-ed pieces showing the benefits of faith, even though her own religious beliefs remain obscure. (See here and here for two of her pieces.)  Funded by Templeton for her work on the book, her activities are turning her into a latter-day Elaine Ecklund and a staple of the liberal faitheist media. Here are some bits from her column.

As evidence accumulates about the many health benefits of religious practice, prayer is looking better and better. Some atheists have even gone public with their own prayer-for-health’s-sake practice.

Take Sigfried Gold, the subject of a recent article in The Washington Post. He’s a thoughtful, articulate man who lives in Takoma Park, Md., and turned 50 yesterday. He is passionate about philosophy and long ago decided that there was no stuff in the universe that was not physical — no supernatural, no divine.

But he also smoked too much, and more than anything else he ate too much. He was worried that his weight — a good 100 pounds of excess fat — would kill him. So he joined a 12-step program to control his food addiction. One of the steps is to turn your problem over to a higher power. So Mr. Gold created a god he doesn’t believe exists: a large African-American lesbian with an Afro that reached the edges of the universe. (Those who find this ridiculous, if not offensive, should read “The Shack,” by William P. Young, in which the Holy Trinity is a black housekeeper, a Hebrew handyman and a mystical Asian gardener with windblown hair. “The Shack” was a runaway New York Times best seller.)

Every day Mr. Gold dropped to his knees to pray, and every day he spent 30 minutes in meditative quiet time. These days Mr. Gold, who calls himself a “born-again atheist,” doesn’t smoke. He doesn’t drink. And, at 5 feet 7 inches, he weighs 150 pounds.

So is there a downside? Should we all drop to our knees and pray? In general, I have to admit I’m impressed with the evidence.

To be sure, Luhrmann then admits that there’s a “downside” to prayer addiction, be it spiritual or atheistic.  She claims to have seen evangelical Christians addicted to prayer almost to the point of insanity. Her secular equivalent is the game “World of Warcraft”, which for some reason she sees as an activity analogous to prayer:

The anthropologist Jeffrey G. Snodgrass and his colleagues set out to study this complex social world. They found people who were relaxed and soothed by their play: “Sometimes I just log on late at night and go out by myself and listen to the soothing music.” Others felt addicted: “Once I start playing it’s hard to tell whether or not I’ll have the willpower to stop.”

What made the difference was whether people found their primary sense of self inside the game or in the world. When play seemed more important than the real world did, they felt addicted; when it enhanced their experience of reality outside the game, they felt soothed.

Prayer works in similar ways. When people use prayer to enhance their real-word selves, they feel good. When it disconnects them from the everyday, as it did for the student, they feel bad.

The imagination is a double-edged sword. It is, from a secular perspective, at the heart of what makes Mr. Gold’s god sufficiently real that he treats it as more than himself. But the capacity to make something real is not the same as the capacity to make it good or useful. That’s a caveat to bear in mind for any kind of prayerful life.

What, exactly, is “sufficiently real”? Is that something like Santa Claus? How can something in which you don’t believe be “sufficiently real”? At best it can be “imaginary but efficacious.”  Well, whatever floats your boat. If believing in an African-American lesbian God can help you stop smoking, fine. Just don’t ask us to believe in it, too.  In fact, I find it disturbing that people can actually create something “sufficiently real” that is as ludicrous as Gold’s God. How does that work? And how does Luhrmann know that it wasn’t just the meditation itself, not the black lesbian God, that helped him stop smoking.  And she’s “impressed with the evidence” for the power of secular prayer. What, exactly, is that evidence?

But what’s more disturbing is Luhrmann’s slight and superficial message, which is basically just her take on prayer, lacking any kind of scientific or statistical analysis (she’s an anthropologist at Stanford).  Her message is simply this: “go ahead and pray, even if you’re an atheist, but don’t get too into it.”  Is that really worthy of a column in the New York Times?

Well, the Times, like most liberal media, shows a disturbing respect for religion these days.  But even that paper is supposed to have journalistic standards. Luhrmann’s piece says exactly nothing. It’s as if she wrote a Times piece on how eating donuts can make you feel good—but don’t eat too many or you’ll get addicted. But the difference between donuts and God is that donuts exist.

***

Professor Ceiling Cat’s Unholy Trio of Famous Female “Believers in Belief”

Tanya Luhrmann
Elaine Ecklund
Krista Tippett

Sun, moon, and man

January 5, 2011 • 6:43 am

If any astronomical photo is gonna make you go all “spiritual”, this is the one. It was taken by Thierry Legault during the partial solar eclipse on Jan. 4, and shows not only the sun and moon, but a space vehicle. Here’s how Thierry describes it on his webpage:

Image of the solar transit of the International Space Station (ISS), taken from the area of Muscat in the Sultanate of Oman on January 4th 2011 at 9:09 UT, during the partial solar eclipse. Takahashi FSQ-106ED refractor on EM-10 mount, Canon 5D mark II. 1/5000s exposure at 100 iso.

Transit forecast calculated by www.calsky.com (many thanks to Arnold Barmettler for his help).Transit duration: 0.86s. ISS distance to observer: 510 km. Speed in orbit: 7.8km/s (28000 km/h or 17000 mph).

(Definitely click on image to enlarge):

Note that Thierry had less than one second to snap this photo before the ISS went out of range!

You can see other fantastic pictures of the ISS docking with the space shuttle Atlantis here, as well as a one-second video of that transit across the Sun’s face, showing how precise Legault had to be to get these shots.  Do go to that link; you won’t regret it.  There are other great photos on his web page, Astrophotography.

Legault is an engineer and astronomy buff who lives outside Paris. Here he is with his gear, poised for that shot:

h/t to Thierry for permission to put up this photo, and to Matthew Cobb for calling it to my attention.

UPDATE:  Phil Plait talks more about the photo on Bad Astronomy.