UPDATE: Over at The New Republic, Isaac Chotiner also takes out after today’s Luhrmann piece. He also excoriates her for her last paragraph:
No one is saying that spirituality can be made to “go away,” and whether it does has nothing to do with whether ghosts actually exist. But for people like Luhrmann, the whole point is to muddy these waters. She concludes:
But what this research makes clear is that when people report that they hear their dead husband or are terrified by an evil presence that groped at their throat in the night, they are not necessarily making it up, nor are they crazy. Events like these are rather what Ann Taves, professor of religious studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, calls the “building blocks” of religious experience. The experiences are psychologically real events. How you interpret them is up to you.
It’s all up to you! Well, of course it is up to you, since we have this thing called freedom of religion and don’t live in a totalitarian society. We can thank Luhrmann for reminding us of this. In the meantime, she might decide that if she wants to be an opinion columnist, she should offer her opinion. My hunch is that the reason she doesn’t want to do so is that it might lead to the following conclusion: Not all “interpretations” are equally valid.
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One of the worst (and most puzzling) things the New York Times has done is give Tanya Luhrmann a regular column. She does nothing but osculate the rump of faith, and all I can imagine is that the Times has decided it needs someone with street cred (Luhrmann is an anthropology professor at Stanford) to make nice to religion. The Times is really, really soft on faith.
In her op-ed piece in today’s Times, “In the presence of all souls,” Luhrmann has finally showed her hand: her work is not simply about objectively reporting the doings of religious people, but about justifying their beliefs. She has lost any shred of objectivity she claimed to have.
Lurhmann was apparently inspired by the death of her dog, as after that demise she still occasionally felt her dog’s presence. (That also happened to me with my late cat.) Doing a bit of digging, she found that people often feel the presence of dead friends or loved ones. In fact, 80% of people have such experiences, which Luhrmann calls “real sensory events.” That wording is an ambiguity that fuels this piece: the blurring between reality and psychological illusions.
She then takes up “sleep paralysis,” a phenomenon whereby people seem to be awake in bed but can’t move. This is often accompanied by strange hallucinations like the presence of ghosts or demons. Luhrmann argues that many allegations of witchcraft throughout history could be based on this form of temporarily paralysis. Unfortunately, I don’t know much about its physiological causes, and Luhrmann doesn’t describe them.
What she does do is argue that just because we experience such hallucinatory phenomena doesn’t mean that the spirits of the dead, or of evil, aren’t real. In other words, she’s using hallucinations to argue that the truth claims of religion could be real, an argument that simply doesn’t make sense. But if you think I’m making this up, just read her words:
To be sure, the fact that we can identify in-the-body phenomena (hallucinations, sleep paralysis) associated with ideas about the supernatural does not necessarily mean that those ideas are false. Mr. Hufford, who also studies near-death and other remarkable experiences, is very clear about that: “Learning as much as we can about spiritual experience does not make spirituality go away.”
But what this research makes clear is that when people report that they hear their dead husband or are terrified by an evil presence that groped at their throat in the night, they are not necessarily making it up, nor are they crazy. Events like these are rather what Ann Taves, professor of religious studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, calls the “building blocks” of religious experience. The experiences are psychologically real events. How you interpret them is up to you.
Can you imagine? We identify delusions or illusions, and can probably show their physiological, neurological, and psychological causes. The ghosts and dog spirits aren’t real, and none of those returning spirits has yet imparted to us any credible information about the afterlife. We can mimic such experiences with various drugs or brain stimulation. Yet Lurhmann nevertheless concludes that there still might be something to spirituality: the presence of real ghosts, souls, and spirits. The fact that there is absolutely nothing to support their existence doesn’t deter her one bit. If they existed, there should be evidence for them, but there isn’t. Conclusion: we can provisionally abandon those beliefs until we get real evidence.
Instead, Luhrmann chooses the opposite, unparsimonious conclusion. She avers that the experiences are “psychologically real” and “open to interpretation.” That’s like saying that there are many people who are convinced that aliens are communicating with them, or that they’ve been abducted by UFOs. Will she then argue that these experiences are also “psychologically real”, and “how we interpret them is up to us.” If you take LSD you’ll have all kinds of “spiritual” hallucinations. Will she then claim that those, too, are grounds for spirituality, and that maybe, just maybe, they give credibility to what we experienced?
No, Dr. Luhrmann, reality is not a judgment call on a delusion. It’s something that can be investigated empirically and cross-checked with other researchers. Determining whether those experiences say something about reality is not up to the average person; it’s up to science. She fails to understand (or willfully promotes the confusion) that psychological reality is not always real reality. And the worst instance of that—the one that earns Luhrmann her grants, papers, and money—is religion.
The last sentence of her piece infuriates me. It’s a total cop-out, an abandonment of science, and a sop to believers, reassuring them they may be neither delusional nor crazy about God. As one of my friends said after reading this, “She’s slipped completely off the deep end. They might as well have Deepak Chopra as a columnist.”
Templeton, and the New York Times, has paid Luhrmann good money to write this kind of nonsense. Why they do it is beyond me.
