levite

I have never heard this expression before: I believe I get your gist, given the context, but I am intrigued-- is this your turn of phrase, or does it come from another writer? If I understand it correctly, I think it is a fairly felicitous phrasing.


Ah, yes. The radical, but vocal, fundamentalist right wing. They are indeed an unfortunate collection of specimens. It has done a world of hurt to religious believers of sound mind that we so consistently hear from people who lack so much creativity, lack so much of what I (at least) would call true faith (since true faith permits questioning, mystery, and even a lack of complete answers), and so consistently confuse the possession of truths with the attainment of Truth. The former is common to most religions, and is something that can include shared overlap with atheists and agnostics; but the latter is a blinding misunderstanding. No one religion, no one book, no one people or faith tradition can have a total monopoly on Truth, for the simple reason that total Truth about God's existence, nature, motivation, His creations, and the universe(s) would be, like God, infinite. And we human beings, who are finite, and physically occupy finite space in a finite universe, cannot ever be so foolish as to imagine that any segment of our populace, or even all of our populace together, could contain and comprehend the infinite.


I'm not sure how much profit there is hypothesizing these points. My feeling is, whether Jesus was schizo and a dab hand with magic, or whether he was a wonder worker reformist and potential prophet (I personally cannot believe he was the Son of God, because my theology does not permit such a concept; and according to my understanding of messianism, he did not do any of the things the messiah, Son of David, is supposed to do in order to fulfill that role, which means he was not the messiah) is irrelevant. His teachings are, overwhelmingly, positive and helpful. Why ought it to matter if he was truly prophetic or a little insane if what he did was to further what I understand to be a Godly agenda? Taking care of poor people, giving aid to the helpless, the downtrodden, and the sick; telling people that wealth comes not from owning possessions but from enriching one's community with good deeds; emphasizing spiritual awareness and simple prayer: all of these seem entirely excellent teachings to me: so what should I care whether his inspiration to teach them really came from God or from a neurochemical imbalance?

As for the prophets of my own tradition, much the same holds true. But if you are asking, what if all of the authors of the Hebrew Scriptures, all of the prophets and the priests and the judges and the rabbis who made the Jewish tradition, all had this same condition, my response is skepticism. We're talking about many hundreds, if not many thousands of people, over the course of a couple of thousand years-- many, many more, if we include all of the normal, everyday folks who had a revelatory experience, but did not go on to contribute something dramatic and new to the tradition. It strains my credibility to suppose that in each and every case, they all had identifical, comparatively rare, seizures or imbalances or malfunctions of the same specific area of the brain, in such a way as to cause them to have shared deeply similar experiences, producing results all constant with the general trends of Jewish thought. That may be an argument against God and religion, but with all due respect, it doesn't strike me as any more objectively reasonable than any religious doctrine.


Yes; but in former times, when psychedelic drugs were still a novelty in Western society, people took LSD and mescaline and came down and swore up and down they'd had revelations of God. Prior to that, there were those who claimed revelations of God while on heroin. And prior to that, other substances. And as awareness of those drugs permeated the society, and among their effects, the illusion of revelation became known to sometimes occur, those who took the drugs casually became increasingly likely to either dismiss their experience as "trip" hallucination, or at least to be in doubt about the literal veracity of their spiritual experiences. My supposition is that this phenomenon of electrical brain stimulation, if not relegated to the realm of neglected scientific curiosities, will similarly come to be understood for what it is, and future participants will experience similar lack of surety or credence.

While I would not presume to guess what motivates idiots who refuse to accept the law of evolution of species, I can also understand that arguments relying heavily on hypotheses having to do with objective reality versus our perceptions due to neurochemistry or neuroelectric signal can be perceived as irritating from . Especially because they are a two-edged sword and are being wielded quite selectively. Sure, we can have an hypothesis that each and every one of the countless millions of revelatory or supernatural religious or spiritual experience all over the world, throughout human history, have been and are the result of neurochemical or neuroelectrical malfunction; but there is no reason that any human experience could not be so hypothesized. How can we, at that point, not question all reality around ourselves as potentially being shared neurochemical or neuroelectric malfunction. The very words on our computer screens could be suspect, if we cannot trust our brains at least the majority of the time.

I mean no disrespect, but to consign all the religious and the supernatural and the spiritual into neural failures to me smacks of Scrooge's rejection of the reality of Marley's ghost:

"Why do you doubt your senses?'' The Ghost asked.

"Because,'' said Scrooge, "a little thing affects them. A slight disorder of the stomach makes them cheats. You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There's more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!''

In the end, I can't help feeling that if religion can manage without complete answers, and can acknowledge that there are things we may never know in our physical lives upon this plane of existence; why cannot scientists merely pursue their research, and not attempt to disprove religion?

I still feel that the best solution is for fundementalists to stop being fundamentalist, whichever side of the debate they may be on. Folks who think that their holy book is 100% literal need to wake up and smell the coffee-- not only is their book not 100% literal, but chances are, it wasn't even written in the language in which they're reading it. But folks who cannot let the Mysteria Divina (Divine Mystery, the mystery that is God) go, without attempting to prove it's a hoax or a sickness or a psychological defect or a conspiracy to control people, also need to wake up and smell the coffee. There are non-fundamentalist religious people, who have nothing against science or reason, for whom such attempts are nonetheless offensive. Not everyone has to believe the same things. We just have to be tolerant enough to let each other live in peace.


**added note: I actually did not intend this last paragraph as a response to what you wrote, ratbastid, so I sincerely hope it didn't sound like I was being accusatory toward you. That wasn't my intention, and indeed, you have been nothing but genteel.

__________________
Dull sublunary lovers love,
Whose soul is sense, cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
That thing which elemented it.

(From "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" by John Donne)