The following is a composite portrait of a believer in charms or totems, gathered from studies of certain native peoples.
He seems to be psychologically continuous with an object [totem] of this sort, as if part of himself were actually contained in it, and in consequence this object has a peculiar fascination for him. It is filled with mana—that invisible secret power that produces in a man awe, attraction, and dread and so exerts an unconditioned influence over him. To him such an object is numinous…
…For it seems as if the object possesses something essential to him, so that interference with it by another is tantamount to interference with the very core of his being.
These quotes refer to an account which is now one hundred years old.* If there are racist undertones in what the account (elsewhere) terms “primitive” peoples, then they are in hindsight ironic, for replacing “object” with “concept of God” above yields a description not far from the modern Western religious person.
This leads nicely into Buddhist philosophy, which studies the mind’s inclination toward attachment to objects or concepts. So let us consider a religious person as one who has acquired an inordinate attachment to the God concept, much like the totemist in the quote above. Since I happen to be familiar with Christianity, suppose he is a Christian.
When he comes into fortune, he sees it as the blessings of God raining down upon him. When his enemies come into fortune, he remembers that God sends rain upon the just and unjust. When he experiences tragedy, he recalls his savior who underwent the ultimate tragedy so that mankind may reach the ultimate joy. When his enemies experience tragedy, he cites scripture saying that men reap what they sow.
His inner experiences are fused with the God concept in his mind, again like the totemist above. If you suggest to him that the Holy Spirit is only a concept, he knows you are wrong because he feels the Holy Spirit as an object of his experience. If you approach him with empirical facts which conflict with his religion, it’s obvious to him that you are wrong—it’s as if you are suggesting that three times three equals eleven. You are mistaken, and it’s only a matter of finding the flaw in your argument.
I suspect this is the main reason why dialogue between believers and non-believers is often forlorn. The non-believer thinks he is addressing some fine point of theology, while the believer sees it as a silly attempt to refute the obvious or, worse, as a personal attack aimed at invalidating his own experience. In a certain sense it’s just a misunderstanding.
For the true believer to be changed in any way, he must adopt a radically new dogma: “I can be mistaken”. The believer needs to decouple, to un-fuse, his inner experience from his conception of God. This is an intensely personal endeavor, for he has to consider (for example) whether it is possible that his feeling of the Holy Spirit is also felt by Hindus under different terminology. Nobody can take these steps for him. A mind is only changed through its own exertion.
All this applies equally to non-believers, of course, the only difference being the concept to which one is attached. As far as humanity goes, the most common attachment is to one’s self-image (or more simply, egotism). So next consider someone who has this attachment—one who is a “true believer” with regard to his own ego.
The corollary of his perspective is an unshakable dogma: “I am right.” If you challenge something he says, he interprets it as a personal attack. Why? Because what you say is obviously not true, and can only be an unseemly attempt to discredit him personally. The explanation for it can only be that you have a grudge against him. Therefore he must fight back using all possible measures (because that is what you are doing). Like all true believers, he is protecting the object of his attachment, that which he covets. Facts, evidence, and reality are not relevant factors.
Enlightenment, for any definition of the term, always results in taking oneself less seriously, not more. The outcome is always humor, not solemnity. This suggests a way out of the trap: first have a good laugh at yourself, then consider that you could be mistaken.
[*] Quotes are from The I and the Not-I by M. Esther Harding, referring to How Natives Think by Lucien Lévy-Bruhl (1910).
The above description of egotism is in full operation for a certain science journalist who engages in bogus attacks against critics, bans opposing voices (termed “bad actors”) from his website, lauds unsubstantiated rumors that support his views, stereotypes critics using labels, and otherwise offers arguments without evidence. Being shielded from criticism, the closed loop, is exactly the phenomenon which enables the slide from reality.
A nice post, but I’m not sure it would be a surprise to all that many nonbelievers that they could be affected by cognitive/conceptual biases. At least I didn’t feel ‘tricked.’ I came to atheism by way of science (reading about it, not practicing it), so I am aware of (and fascinated by) cognitive biases, fallacious thinking, the provisional state of knowledge, etc.
It seems to me there are many ways in which atheism is, ironically, compatible with certain spiritual/mystical ‘goals.’ Atheism can undermine the idea of the ‘Self’ (you are not cosmically special, your ‘self’ is an illusion/construction of the operations of your brain); it eliminates dualism (mind/body or spirit/flesh, cosmic good/evil).
I’m not at all suggesting atheists can’t be egotistical and blind, of course….
Yes, upon reading it again I winced at the “tricked” sentence. I’ve removed it. It was originally a winking reference to a certain science journalist who exhibits the symptoms of egotism mentioned in the post (and more).
An important point I think here for a significant percentage of people the precondition to that realization would be more “that my Pastor/Guru/Parents” can be mistaken first. Since belief is often faith that what others have told you is correct. This precondition is a part of growing up that some people just never get to.
I think that much of the divide has been formalized by apologists, and has been expressed in their writing.
William Lane Craig claims that atheist arguments are a smokescreen to hide behind from the obviousness of God’s truth. Presuppositionalists… presuppose. Van Tillians explicitly deny that any Christian can seriously suppose that his or her beliefs are false, so at best, arguments are only useful as strategy. Thomists take the validity of the Summa arguments as dogma. Pragmatic apologetics enshrine arguments from personal experience.
Apologists are apologists, etc. Believing that an apologist for religion is seriously considering the possibility that his or her religion is false is extremely unsafe.
This is why so many atheist-Christian debates take the “Gish Gallop” form. This is why (inconsistently applied) arguments and standards which would not be taken remotely seriously outside of apologetics are so common, like “if a lot of people have believed it for a long period of time, then it is more likely true than false.”
It is why arguments to regress are arbitrarily stopped at “God.” It is why cosmological, teleological, ontological, and so many other arguments are usually tacitly assumed to be referring to the same thing. It is why refuting any laundry list of arguments does not usually change minds.
The mindset is so entrenched that it often manifests itself through amusing projections, like the relativistic claims of AiG or Craig’s `intellectual smokescreens’, as wonderfully explained here:
Zach, yeah those apologetics are mind-boggling weird. But I also find it strange that atheists spend so much time refuting them (as in the Chris Hallquist article link), assuming their purpose is something more than the sheer entertainment value of it, that is.
It’s as if William Lane Craig proposes that some enormous number which looks like 4853…7718 is prime, and then people undertake an analysis of it. And I’m thinking, “WTF? It’s even. Stop there.”
Likewise my reaction to that brand of apologist is, “WTF? He says that he cannot be mistaken. Stop there.”
A quick word of Craig, he is indeed not to be reasoned with for more reasons than I even want to try to mention. What surprises me is that nonbelievers take him seriously.
But that is apologetics. God is real, and everybody knows god. So if you deny god there is something else going on.
Argument is not to discover reality, it’s to protect a position and have it win.
So many arguments one hears in apologetics are simply a mix of the two. For one, any argument that puts the unbeliever on the defensive and wins the argument is OK, and second there is a genuine belief that rejecting god is arrogant etc.
But the point is not to convince everybody. The point is really to display the alternative. Very few people drastically change the core of their world view once they reached a certain age, but with generations evolving there is malleability.
In fact evangelicals have realized this and now fight for education, and really what it is, is protecting a path that allows to innoculate a world view from situations that are cognitively dissonant and may lead to doubt.
“…Very few people drastically change the core of their world view once they reached a certain age…”
Why should they, if they perceive there is no benefit to do so? Yet the religious are religious not because they are inherently happy, but because they are inherently fearful.
We atheists do a very poor job indeed of enticing the religious to examine their initial premises, because we don’t market atheism in terms of features and benefits that are more attractive than their current situation.
Really, we should be selling atheism as a better alternative than religion to bring meaning to their lives, to allay their fears, to bring real salvation into their lives. We should be promoting atheism toward their emotional natures not toward their rational faculties, which they have surrendered long ago.
Gingerbaker, that sounds like a pitch to “frame” atheism. I don’t know.
As far as the emotional side goes, the only thing I would mention to believers is that there is a certain catharsis in finally being aware of not knowing, as there is no longer the burden or the compulsion to defend arbitrary claims.
There’s no reason to sell false hopes about meaning or salvation, as religion does, but only the opportunity to learn about those issues from an autonomous, grown-up perspective. There are no such answers in religion or atheism, but at least the latter is honest about it.
Oedipus – I don’t think I am recommending a strategy based on framing false hopes. I am recommending a strategy that might get the religious to actually examine their (false) initial premise.
Think about the benefits of being an atheist and a rationalist compared to being religious.
There is a lot of fear and worrying we no longer need to confront – fear of sinning, of going to hell, of getting a disease because of a wrathful god. Fear of being judged by our peers for not being pious enough, or for enjoying activities that are taboo. The idea of not suffering enough in this lifetime in order to find paradise in the next, despite one’s apprehensions that it may not exist. The fear of losing one’s faith.
Since rational approaches don’t work very well with the religious, we must – if we are serious about moving demographics – appeal to the emotional side. If only to get people to ask the most important question which is, as you say, “Am I mistaken?”
I don’t care if you call it framing or marketing. The idea is to communicate fruitfully. And I don’t think that I have seen much of anything said by anyone about communicating on an emotional level. We atheists, after all, are a bloody rational lot, rational to the point of geekiness. Perhaps t is time to consider an additional approach.
Gingerbaker, I shouldn’t have been dismissive, it’s just that what you’re saying resembles the vague platitudes upon which some journalists and “communicators” prop up their careers. Nobody can quite figure out what their message is.
It looks like you are claiming that there exists a “something happens” for which the following occurs.
Have you ever observed a “something happens”? What’s an example? Or are you advocating that a research project be undertaken to find the “something happens”? If the latter, then we don’t yet know what it is. It may contain emotional appeals, but it may not. Even granting that you somehow do know that it contains emotional appeals, we still don’t know what the actual “something happens” is, so we can’t use this information.
Discussing these kinds of formless notions is always contentious because everyone gets a different idea of what the “something happens” is, and then people argue with each other because, naturally, nobody agrees. Without some grounding in evidence, it never gets resolved while needless factions are created.
I think I know why I’m so averse to this line of thought: it reeks of manipulation. Though I’m sure that’s not what Gingerbaker meant, it’s a subtle feeling I get from this.
I don’t want to follow some strategy in order to “get results” out of interlocutors. I don’t want to have a plan in my head unless the person I’m speaking with is aware of it. There shouldn’t be one level of conversation here and another level of conversation with believers. It should all be on the same level, with believers and non-believers treated as peers.
So the thing to say to believers is just what you’re saying to me now. Say that you wonder how to convey that the emotional life of non-believers is just as satisfactory as that of believers, perhaps more so. Or that rationality can appear cold-hearted. Or whatever is on your mind. But to formulate a strategic plan for the conversation seems … creepy.
Isn’t there something in Zen about ‘not having a gaining thought?’
I very rarely see the ‘Something happens” moment. Sad, really.
I like the thrust of this article, though, especially the scenario you quote in your last post.
“But to formulate a strategic plan for the conversation seems … creepy.”
Is it creepy to come to a conversation forearmed with reasoned replies to typical misapprehensions? Should we deliberately forget the counterpoint to, say, the Anthropic Principle because it is ‘manipulative’ to use a canned argument?
Oedipus, this very post is about how a rational, evidence-based approach is likely doomed to failure with a totemic personality. And we recently have new scientific evidence that the presentation of corrective facts actually reinforces the dogmatic psyche – contrary to any reasonable expectation.
Basically, this seems to leave us with ridicule. Which is fine and dandy with me. But I am simply suggesting that this “Something happens” moment about which you speak might be easier to accomplish by an appeal to the emotional side of the dogmatist – as his rational faculties have long been broken.
Before the god-besotted can arrive at that “Hey, wow! I could be mistaken after all! ” they need a reason to even examine that premise in the first place. And you admit yourself it is nigh impossible to to achieve this by feats of logic.
Now, I am no Nisbettian philosopher. I don’t know what, or even if there is an emotion-based gambit that will produce that introspective inclination in the godbothered. But we atheists, by our very natures, have happily spent millions of man-hours looking for the perfect rational rhetorical nuclear bomb that would allow the religious to perceive reality, alas to to little or no avail.
Is it not time to put heads together to come up with an emotion-based approach that might work?
Maybe it is a new bus slogan Or a new way to open up a conversation about religion with a faith head.
Perhaps it might be: “Hey, you know the great thing about atheism? No more living in fear.”
Or, “Since I became an atheist, I am – for the first time – truly happy to be living in this world”.
Now, how often – if at all – have you seen it advocated that atheism be promoted in such a manner? And why should it not be?
Gingerbaker, my sentence “But to formulate a strategic plan for the conversation seems … creepy” referred to my comment as a whole. It can’t be lifted out of context like that.
Whatever the plan is, as long as it entails full disclosure, as long as there is no attempt to strategically withhold information from believers, as long as they are treated as peers, then I am fine with it.
Listen guys, the whole point of religion is to deny death. Somehow. To deny that we are meat like the rest of the meat on the planet. It’s absurd, I know, but the vast majority of humans demand it. At root we seem to be theological creatures. Statistically, I don’t think that can be argued.
We get a pleasant chemical squirt for believing the utterly ridiculous. It’s a wonderful tool for cohesion and control.
You can’t talk people out of a pleasant addiction when the junk is free. We will never see its end. It can only be “reengineered”.
The more ridiculous the better. That way there is hope of figuring out the control mechanism. Enter that new religion, sign tall oh gee, or whatever it is. Problem is… some people still take it Sirius-ly. For them there is the uber upper levels where dopes spend all their cash to practice being like marvin the martian and bugs bunny until they either figure out it’s a great big joke or become a clone of TC. It’s a huge win either way!
I agree with Gingerbaker. Atheism must be promoted on more than rational grounds. Humans are emotional beings. It is folly to disregard it.
And yes, some of us are attempting to do this. I began with an article in Free Inquiry titled “The Gift of a Wise Man,” which is still available on the web at:
http://www.secularhumanism.org/index.php?page=factor_dwd§ion=fi
In the last two years I have been writing a column for Secular Humanist Bulletin called “Heart and Mind,” which attempts to awaken awareness of this aspect of atheism (sheesh, that assonance was accidental, I swear) among other atheists.
Oh, Allah, make it stop! 😀
Better sign off.