I have a lot of distaste for idiotic fruity liberals, by which I usually mean hippies and their ilk. Not all of them, of course, but a vast majority, or at least the ones I seem to come across. People with whom I am ashamed to identify with as a liberal, because they are idiots and say stupid things like I am voting for Obama because in my gut I just feel he is the right person. It almost makes me want to be a conservative, but two weeks ago I spoke to a random girl who wore a utilikilt but was defiantly red, and she was even more aggravating. And I'm sure there are much worse than she.
Anyway, my crusade against the spiritual basically comes down to the fact that being spiritual is just an easy way for people to pretend they aren't religious even though they really are. Now, I hate religion with a passion. I see no difference between Scientology and Catholicism. (Scientology only seems more silly because it is newer. Older religions have the benefit of being spoon fed at an early age. Too bad for Suri Cruise.) There are differences, of course, between the spiritual and religious. They're spelled differently, for one. Religion is organized (outside of Yoga parlors), for two. But really, they're both illogical beliefs, rooted in absolutely no proof, and, if anything, proof to the contrary.
Science can't explain everything, but it attempts to with a rigorous and evidence-based method. Scientific knowledge is continuously accruing, and there is simply no excuse to be religious these days anymore. There probably hasn't been for at least the past century. Perhaps there was a time when religion seemed worthwhile as it provided a means to an end. But as the great Mencken said: "It is often argued that religion is valuable because it makes men good, but even if this were true it would not be a proof that religion is true. That would be an extension of pragmatism beyond endurance. Santa Claus makes children good in precisely the same way, and yet no one would argue seriously that the fact proves his existence. The defense of religion is full of such logical imbecilities." Mencken also said: "The only way to reconcile science and religion is to set up something which is not science and something that is not religion." And Einstein wrote: "The word god is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weakness, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish."
Idiotic fruity liberals will, of course, as per their presented image, decry such things as creationism. They will be pro-science and get their news from NPR. And yet they will accept astrological bullshit (just for fun, they swear), become "one" with nature, and tell people they're "not religious, but they're spiritual," as though believing in spirits was somehow an enlightened and advantageous state of being, more than the average atheist and certainly more than rudimentary religious folk. They spew faux-intellectual thoughts (which, no doubt, they heard on NPR that same morning or read in some tract or pamphlet) without having considered what they're saying themselves. They read about issues without reading into them. They are bandwagon liberals who want to appear smart but don't really know what they're talking about.
I was talking to my roommate a few days ago about my new crusade. Now I'm not talking about my annoying, crazy, vegan roommate, who of course is exactly one of these idiotic fruity bandwagon liberals, but the one that I like who is generally thoughtful and reasonable. Anyway, she said that she wouldn't loudly announce it, but that she'd consider herself spiritual. So I asked her what she meant by this. Do you believe in God? Do you believe in spirits of trees and animals? And she replied that she simply thought there was a higher being than humans. Like god? No. You know, life is so complex, it's not just randomness. And I said do you know what that is? that is intelligent design. And she denied it. But that is precisely what it is. Spirituality is the belief of something superhuman and supernatural. It is supersilly. I don't know why the spiritual get a free pass. It is as intellectually squalid as religion.
What is strange about all this is that I think the hardest things for people to believe are things they cannot see (hear/feel/smell/etc.) with their own eyes (senses.) People can read and grasp Einstein's theories of relativity, and yet they won't really believe that a moving clock ticks slower than a stationary one. It is natural to be skeptical of things that you can't see and seem illogical, and yet most of this world is willing to blindly follow babbling psychopaths go on about gods and higher authorities and heavens and hells.
To all the spiritual people, I say, stop being so disorganized; arrange neatly and be horrified to discover yourselves no different than the religious.
Thursday, May 29, 2008
My crusade against the spiritual.
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15 comments:
I'm pretty sure that when people say they are "spiritual" they just mean they like to get overly-emotional when they see a pretty flower.
That article I found specifically mentions these people: "We also become spiritual when we become moved by values such as beauty, love, or creativity that seem to reveal a meaning or power beyond our visible world. An idea or practice is "spiritual" when it reveals our personal desire to establish a felt-relationship with the deepest meanings or powers governing life."
Unless you're talking about people who aren't looking for something beyond our visible world. In which case, you're speaking of not the spiritual but the romantic.
I mean I think some people choose "spiritual but not religious" because they think the other non-religious choices, particularly atheist, sound cold and unemotional. Spiritual but not religious means you have a lot of Feelings but you don't go to church.
Nice first part of your post.
There should be a non-profit group about this. Something like: "Liberals Against Dumb-ass Liberals as Ignorant as the People They Rail Against"
or LADLIPTRA for short.
But isn't that exactly it, h.? Spiritual but not religious means you have a lot of Feelings but you don't go to church. For most of those people, they're unwilling to attribute those lots of Feelings to some biological phenomena because they aren't cold and clinical, and instead they attribute it to something else (what? they won't say religion, but it's something they can't define, something they know intuitively, and something they believe and have faith in even though they can't prove it.) People want to believe that their emotions and feelings and intuition are special and not just neural circuits.
If I were a wonky writer that Oprah likes, I'd say something like, "Having emotions and feelings isn't science, it's human." But I'm a Conceited Robot so I won't.
Sign me up for LADLIPTRA. We can have meetings at my house and take inspiration from my crazy vegan roommate who enjoys NPR and smudging the house (to ward off bad spirits and release negative energy, of course.)
Andy,
You should read the last chapter of The End of Faith by Sam Harris. He talks about a kind of pragmatic spiritualism backed up by science--like showing how meditation stimulates the brain and how consciousness may reside in a specific part of the cerebrum.
Anyway, religion is still for morons, and the conservatives who worship it and the liberals who tolerate it are part of the problem. If I told a liberal that I believed that the world was flat, and that my only evidence was a magic book, he would say I was crazy. If I told him that a man rose from the dead and floated into heaven, and that I read about it in the bible, he would say, "You know what? I respect your belief." Stupid.
I'll try to pick up The End of Faith at the library. I don't have any problem with things like meditation, or eastern medicines like acupuncture. It fascinates me that our emotions are neural responses to what our body senses around us. And I don't want to diminish personal experiences, either. Even if they can be scientifically explained, that doesn't mean you can't appreciate them. I just don't like it when people say acupuncture works because it releases negative energy and Qi or some other BS. Just because we have anecdotal evidence of something to be true but haven't yet developed an understanding of why it is, people just decide to attribute it to magic. It is kind of like that thing sci-fi writer (of 2001) Arthur C. Clarke said: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Just because it is indistinguishable from magic doesn't mean it is magic.
Religion (and its sibling Spirituality) is this laziness where instead of working to get at an answer for unexplainable things, you just accept it as unexplainable. It's the science of giving up.
Can we please stop pretending that science and religion have anything to do with each other?
Andy, you say we have reached a point where religion is useless because science is so advanced. Sorry, no. Religion was never about explaining why an apple falls on your head, or why the birds of the Galapagos have slightly different features. It was about finding answers the big question of why we're alive, and what we should do with our consciousness. Science can't answer these big questions, because science is merely descriptive. As you said, it offers evidence. But evidence has to be interpreted, which means that all scientific conclusions are subjective, and therefore beholden to our beliefs. Religion is not cancelled out by science.
Robert, you say that neuroscience can lead to a better understanding of spirituality. Again, no. You're forgetting that science can only describe what is there; it can't tell us WHY it's there. Your brain responds and adapts to the ways in which you use it. Just because you see evidence of meditation in an FMRI, doesn't mean that meditation happens in the brain. You can look at brain scans all you want, but they're not going to explain why someone has a spiritual experience.
Andy, the reason you can't make sense of people who say they're spiritual is because they are not a group. They are individuals with their own reasons. You wouldn't walk into a meeting of transgender people and say: okay, you're not straight, and you're not gay, so figure yourselves out, or else you're bullshit. Would you?
Actually, you might.
Sorry to be argumentative. I like arguments.
I like arguments too! About the spiritual, mostly I'm saying they're hypocrites.
As for science/religion, Stephen Jay Gould says something similar, what he termed Nonoverlapping Magisteria.
I think you (and Gould) offer the religious too much leeway. Taking Catholicism, for example, I think both of you are arguing that biblical inerrancy doesn't count because no one seriously believes that God created the universe in six days. But I think there really are plenty of people who think that. For example, even though the poll is kind of flawed, in an August 2005 Gallup poll, 58% of the public said that creationism was definitely or probably true as an explanation for the origin and development of life.
In fact, I think religion was devised precisely to explain things like why an apple falls on your head. Lightning, for example, was once explained as the result of an angry god. Galileo was jailed (placed under house arrest for life, anyway) for suggesting a heliocentric model of the universe because it contradicted the Bible. When my sister was in Dominica, she was constantly being told she was sinning for, say, dying her hair. When my sister got sick they told her it was religious retribution. When she developed a keloid on her ear, they said she was being possessed by spirits and avoided her. Of course, she actually developed the keloid because she’d removed her ear piercings and we know it’s simply an overgrowth in scar tissue as it healed, but the Dominicans didn’t know this so they chalked it up to something supernatural. They probably don’t think lightning is God hurtling lightning bolts as they’ve moved beyond that, but if there is a prolonged drought or an especially bad hurricane season, they will blame god. So their scientific knowledge is at such a point, ours is further ahead, but there are certainly many more things that will be explained that right now we can’t and some people currently explain via the supernatural. How can you possibly say religion and science have nothing to do with each other? They are inexplicably tied. As we learn new things, explain formerly unexplainable phenomena, slowly we discard the supernatural explanations that were given by religion. I won’t even get into Scientology and its thetans. (Although admittedly, I don't really know that much about Scientology except for the stuff everyone else seems to know. But I think by looking at how Scientology develops, we can get a pretty good idea of how older religions developed.)
Maybe it's just a semantics issue, but I think there is a difference between philosophical wonderings about ethics and existence, and religion. It definitely seems that Gould equates the two, when there are clearly differences. Religion posits a bunch of explanations that have a basis in the supernatural. Religious moral behavior, when reduced, is justified by what is written in the bible (or some other text), and there is an underlying threat of heaven and hell (Eastern religions, like Hinduism or Buddhism, use the threat of reincarnation, and what you reincarnate as.) It’s bullying to get people to act a certain way. A secular philosophical study would have as its justification for a moral system perhaps something like Kant’s idea of duty and the a priori and a fortiori tests and distinctions. Or maybe there is a more biosociological view where we gravitate toward a certain set of moral behavior because it offers the best chances of species/personal survival. At any rate, a religious justifications for a certain code of morality is different than a secular justification, even if they are the same set of morals. If you want to equate this secular philosophical questioning with religion, then I think you are disregarding what religion is historically. You can’t just throw out the parts of religion that are now demonstrably false, and leave the rest (until the next thing comes along.)
“Robert, you say that neuroscience can lead to a better understanding of spirituality. Again, no. You're forgetting that science can only describe what is there; it can't tell us WHY it's there.”
OF COURSE neuroscience can describe many things that used to be regarded as spiritual. Let’s take entheogens as an example. We can now locate exactly where and how many neurotransmitters effect the brain, and why it would induce hallucinatory/spiritual/mystical/religious experiences. We can look at brain scans, see that having taken this hallucinogen does something to a certain section (turns it off, say), and then in another scan see that this same section shows activity when people see flashing lights. So we conclude that our visual cortex is functioning independently because neural pathways are compromised after having taken particular chemicals, causing us to see things that are not what we are used to.
But before we were able to isolate these chemicals scientifically, people used them to create these experiences which they simply attributed to religion or mysticism or magic since they had no other explanation.
In a hundred years, people will look back at our time and think crude and ridiculous a lot of things that we think today. Will we ever reach a point where we actually can explain the big question of why we’re alive? I don’t know. It doesn’t seem likely in the near future. If you keep asking why, you’ll eventually get to a point where there’s no answer. If we ever get an answer, it would require a revolutionary shift in thinking, and we are probably stuck in the wrong dimension to understand it as we, unlike Billy Pilgrim, can’t get unstuck in time. But look how far we’ve come in just the past hundred years. It’s hard to believe Relativity even though it’s been measurably proven. If there were some way to test the Twin Paradox, I’d be right there when the spaceship lands to see for myself.
If I could go back in time with scientific inventions of today, I'd be deified. And even though I'd enjoy having a religion devoted to me and a really big statue in my likeness, I'd still know it was just science.
God damn that took a long time to write.
Uh, yeah. Science is not merely descriptive. The whole point is that it is explanatory. Before when your auntie died of breast cancer it was due to God's will. Now we know it is because God's will did something bad to her BRCA1.
This must be the longest comments section ever.
All right, Mr. Andy, I'm going to read the Gould thing and get back to you.
But as for the origin of religion, I'm not convinced it came about to explain the physical world. There is a narrative impulse behind any discussion of, say, lightning bolts as a message from God. Say your friend's house gets struck by lightning. She's stunned. All she had is gone. She could tell you exactly what happened, using what she knows about the science of lightning. But that wouldn't do justice to how she's feeling. So she talks about it in terms of fate, chance, karma, what-have-you. She has to invent something like a religion in order to talk about such a terrifying event. It's not because she was curious about the physical properties of lightning.
Science can only yield facts. That is why I say it's descriptive. In order to use the facts you have to invoke judgment and speculation.
Andy, I'm seriously impressed by all the work you've put in this, especially since it makes me sound like a hack. But I still disagree about neuroscience. I think it's generally bullshit. Some lights go off in your brain when you have a hallucination. Big deal. The lights aren't the hallucination itself. And if the hallucination is any good, you're going to have a damn hard time describing it to anyone. Much less describing it with a chart of the colors that lit up your brain at the time. At this juncture you need to invent a kind of narrative to explain the hallucination. So we fall back on metaphor. "Mother earth spoke to me in the form of a red donkey with bat wings, man!" That stuff is not going to show up in your brain scan.
Speaking as someone who's been to all three places, spirituality is a halfway house between religiosity and atheism.
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