I understand what you’re saying, but it’s not going to stop me from being generally and vocally anti-religion.
I’m someone whose brain is not wired for spiritual experience; I’ve never had one nor even wanted to have one. Because of this, for a long time, I didn’t really understand the point of view of religious people. I took a course on the psychology of religious belief, in which we read (among other things) William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience. It’s a seminal work in the field, and while the field has made quite a lot of progress since then (as Desrtopa points out below), it’s still very informative. This helped me realize that others’ brains were doing things that mine wasn’t.
Nevertheless, religious claims are explanations for such experiences, and they’re bad explanations. The popularity of those claims is harmful to rational pursuits. Decrying religion is about the claims and not the experiences, despite how many people seem unwilling to separate the two. For me, the falsity and harmfulness of the claims trumps the genuineness and significance of the experiences, if the latter is dependent on the former (but it doesn’t seem in principle like it should be).
For me, the falsity and harmfulness of the claims trumps the genuineness and significance of the experiences, if the latter is dependent on the former (but it doesn’t seem in principle like it should be).
I agree with the first part of your statement, and as for the second—yes, exactly. I don’t think the experiences are dependent on the claims. In fact I wouldn’t be surprised if the claims [regarding the existence of a god or gods] originated as a rationalization of the experiences [the particular chemical state that produces, in human brains, a sense of ecstatic spiritual awareness].
And to me it makes the atheist message stronger if we can still have our tight-knit social communities and our occasional ecstactic brain-state, even while we agree that there’s almost certainly no such thing as God.
I understand what you’re saying, but it’s not going to stop me from being generally and vocally anti-religion.
I’m someone whose brain is not wired for spiritual experience; I’ve never had one nor even wanted to have one. Because of this, for a long time, I didn’t really understand the point of view of religious people. I took a course on the psychology of religious belief, in which we read (among other things) William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience. It’s a seminal work in the field, and while the field has made quite a lot of progress since then (as Desrtopa points out below), it’s still very informative. This helped me realize that others’ brains were doing things that mine wasn’t.
Nevertheless, religious claims are explanations for such experiences, and they’re bad explanations. The popularity of those claims is harmful to rational pursuits. Decrying religion is about the claims and not the experiences, despite how many people seem unwilling to separate the two. For me, the falsity and harmfulness of the claims trumps the genuineness and significance of the experiences, if the latter is dependent on the former (but it doesn’t seem in principle like it should be).
I agree with the first part of your statement, and as for the second—yes, exactly. I don’t think the experiences are dependent on the claims. In fact I wouldn’t be surprised if the claims [regarding the existence of a god or gods] originated as a rationalization of the experiences [the particular chemical state that produces, in human brains, a sense of ecstatic spiritual awareness].
And to me it makes the atheist message stronger if we can still have our tight-knit social communities and our occasional ecstactic brain-state, even while we agree that there’s almost certainly no such thing as God.