Ah, you misunderstand. I’m not saying that the four canonical Gospels emerged from a literal game of Telephone. The game is a useful analogy because it shows that even when people are trying very hard to repeat a short phrase accurately, innocent divergence is inevitable in a matter of seconds. When there are no such constraints, and especially when evangelists of the message have a vested interest in making it more exciting or attractive in order to swell the coalition, the inevitable divergence over decades is bound to be significant. Why else would the canonical Gospels diverge from each other so much (to say nothing of how much further they diverge from the non-canonical Gospels of Thomas, Peter, Mary, Phillip etc. etc.)? In any case, that was just one of the many mechanisms I presented in my last post whereby myths surrounding significant people emerge, as they do in all cultures. Aspersing the Chinese Whispers analogy alone does little to undermine this universal fact.
And note that I referenced the actual experimental evidence that humans are indeed psychologically predisposed towards building coalitions, filtering out cognitively dissonant facts, remembering cognitively consonant facts disproportionately, synchronising with a collective peer-group and so on and so forth. I hoped this would go some way to making it less likely in future that you will complain that atheists never present any evidence for their explanations - are my hopes justified in your opinion, or in vain?
Again, you seem to be seeing these conditions as a black and white demarcation between complete absence and a debilitating full-on seizure or something. That is just not so. As the studies I referenced in the OP clearly show, these conditions follow a continuum in which only the very highest levels of activity bring about unconsciousness. Those with merely heightened levels of activity do not undergo regular seizures but instead gain the neurological benefits of a feeling of cosmic salience or overwhelming agape without the debilitating costs. And even these episodes need not be continuous - a brief spell of such epiphanic bliss is enough to sustain a long period of creative interpretation thereafter (as I can personally testify).
In any case, I find it interesting that the three examples you feel are not well explained by the clinical phenomena in my OP are historical - from 2000, 150 and 50 years ago respectively. Obviously, extrapolating psychiatric conditions back to historical figures is fraught with uncertainties given the frugality of reliable evidence. Why not focus on the aspects of religious experiences people have now which you think are poorly explained?
Out of curiosity, I’ve now reviewed ITR’s links about da Costa and Lorber. Frankly, I don’t worry much about the self-reported experiences of mystics. As a rule, unlike SM, I attribute these not to mental illness but imagination and wishful thinking. It’s the same approach I use for Mohammed and Joseph Smith. If I’m fair in discounting the latter, so too am I fair in discounting the former.
I will say further that I find the da Costa story deeply disturbing. If God really did cause her all that suffering that we may learn, I say bad on God.
Wait, we have rulers?? How come nobody in the atheist cabal mentioned that to me? I am so insulted, you guys. Whine How come I never get to be in the In Group? (Flounces off in a snit.)
(Pokes head back in…) Oh, and by the way, considering the jackasses driving in the rain this morning, I’m hardly extolling the glories of man. Hell, I’m not even extolling the glories of the body, considering that I have H1N1, bronchitis, a zit by my nose, and bad knees in the rain. (If this is the image of God, I feel sorry for the bastard.)
I might also add, that considering I can’t figure out how to get rid of a damn computer virus, I’m hardly entranced by the quest for immortality through technology. Hopefully the smartie pants leading our scientific quest are not using Windows. Worship technology, my ass.
And also, I hate to break it to you, but we all die. So I guess I concede the point about atheists following a path that leads to death. But we’re hardly alone in that.
Which definition of “religion” would you prefer to use? Obviously there are several variants. And by any of them, either atheism doesn’t qualify, or everything qualifies.
I am focusing on the cases of da Costa and Lorber precisely because the evidence concerning them is so strong, because we do know such a tremendous amount about their experiences from both their own very thorough writings and the numerous other people who interacted with them during their decades of interacting with God. There is certainly no “frugality of evidence”. It would be nice if one could name a living individual have similar experiences. There may well be such individuals; after all, 6.5 billions persons is a lot of persons. But in cases from the relatively recent past where we have excellent records of an individual’s life, that seems to be like a perfectly good opportunity to investigate the nature of religious experience.
Now you said that these two individuals sounded to you like “clear instances” of TLE or alien voice syndrome. I can’t find any information about the later, and the former does not seem to match up at all with what either experienced. In your analysis of religious experience, you seem to prefer focusing on “euphoric feeling of loving calm”, “cosmic salience”, or a “sense of oneness”. While I’m sure those are part of the mystical experience for many, they’re not in these two cases I’m referring to.
Let’s look at Alexandrina da Costa first. Her experiences cannot in any sense be described as feelings of calm or oneness. She felt very definitely the presence of God as a separate being, as indeed all Christian mystics do. In other words, she felt herself to be encountering what Rudolph Otto describes as “that which is wholly other”, the very opposite of feeling a sense of oneness with the universe. The emotions and sensations that characterized her experiences were also the ones that Otto finds most frequently in numinous experiences from around the globe: awe, fear, being overpowered, extreme urgency. In other words, the opposite of calm. In addition to speaking with Jesus Christ and angels, she also believed on some occasions that she was being attacked by demonic forces, though this lasted for only a few years of her lifetime. So, in short, her experiences seem to be the very opposite of the emotional experience that you posit as their explanation.
Now, why would I favor believing that Alexandrina was having genuine experiences? Well, there are a lot of reasons. There’s the fact that she was paralyzed. This was checked by many doctors; it was not faked. Yet during her ecstasies:
(Quoting from The Miracle Detective, an excellent investigation of miracles and visions among Catholics.) The ecstasies occurred at exactly the same time on Friday afternoons for more than three years, accurate to a single second. I’m not aware of any form of seizure that strikes with such regularity. Then there’s also the fact that she survived for twelve years with no food or drink other than a daily communion wafer and wine, as was confirmed by multiple teams of skeptical doctors and scientists. But to me, the crux of the matter is simply asking whether the experiences that she had were likely to originate in her mind or not. For a certainty, giving the amount of suffering that she experienced, they cannot have resulted from wishful thinking. The number, intensity, and continuity of her visions and experiences preclude any attempt to explain them away as “merely heightened levels of awareness”. And lastly the contents of the experiences simply defy such easy explanation. She was almost totally uneducated and unread, yet those who read her writings agreed that what she wrote down was extremely clear and organized, indicated good mental health, and agreed with Catholic doctrine to a much greater extent than what an unschooled person would be capable of making up.
The case of Jakob Lorber is even more clear, in some ways. He did not experience any extremes of emotion at all when he heard the voice. Both Lorber and those around him agreed that he was calm as a cucumber throughout the experience. He was, again, not experiencing any sense of oneness or anything of the sort. He was hearing of voice, which he felt to be coming from his chest region, and he wrote down exactly what the voice said. It was not a case a creative interpretation after the fact.
Again, the best evidence lies in the contents: what the voice said. Lorber was trained as a musician, he had no college education. Yet what he wrote down covered tremendous ground that was worlds away from his own thoughts. It dealt mostly with theology, philosophy, ethics, and morality, but also at times went into topics including physics, biology, astronomy, engineering, history, economics, and a great deal more. By his own admission, Lorber knew nothing about these topics. He said that he was often completely surprised by what the voice said, it used words and phrases that he was completely unfamiliar with and had never heard before, but these words and phrases were real things with definite meaning in the relevant communities. Moreover, the entire contents of his work simply have as much organization and unity as an excellent piece of literature.
Consider some of what he said: “[The stars are] many millions of planetary suns, with planets like our earth moving around them, forming one solar region.” [In recent years, astronomers have confirmed the existence of planets orbiting other stars. His ‘solar region’ corresponds to a galaxy.] “There are larger and smaller solar regions.” [There are larger and smaller galaxies.] Lorber described his solar regions as gathered in “solar universes”, which were in turn gathered in “universes of universes”. [Galaxies are gathered in clusters, and clusters are gathered in superclusters.] Each universe of universes “is moving at a tremendous speed”. [Galaxies are all moving through space at a tremendous speed.] “Each solar region has a central sun, always so large that it has hundreds, thousands, and indeed sometimes millions, of times the material content of the smaller suns circling around it.” [Today we know that ordinary stars orbit around the center of galaxies. Most, if not all, large galaxies have a supermassive black hole or quasar at the center, which can indeed be millions of times as massive as a star.] In the largest galaxies, such a central sun may “increase again by millions of times, sometimes even thousands of millions, in proportion of magnitude and also of light.” [Quasars can give off millions or billions of times as much light as an ordinary star.] Lorber describes star structure and formation: “From an enormous star, the purest of gases is burning, and this must always be present in superabundance in the great inner gasometers of the sun … these gases are flung into infinity. At some point in the depth of space they then become stars.”
[Stars burn hydrogen fuel for most of their life and the the nebulae where new stars are formed contain gases including some from supernovae.] Lorber also wrote about particle physics. He said “an atom is made up of even smaller constituents”. [This we now know to be true.] These smaller constituents “border on the airy or cloudy form”. [Physicists now think of an electron as a cloud rather than a solid particle.] There is “a cloudy envelope” around the outside of every atom. [Electron clouds form around the outside of atoms.] “Due to the properties of their cloudy envelopes, atoms sometimes attract … and sometimes repel.” [Electrons determine the chemical properties of atoms.] To see the structure of an atom, “you need to magnify a trillion times-something you will probably never achieve in earthly life. No mortal eye will be able to see things as they really are,” [This is how much magnification one would need to see an atomic nucleus, and of course we are not able to do that.] Lorber describes particles that last billions, trillionths, and quadrillionths of a second. [Modern physics has found particles with such very short lifetimes.] “light [is] an effect of electricity and magnetism.” “Light is an emanation, produced by rapid, indeed billionfold vibration of the smallest particles” [Today we know that light is made of photons, which have a dual nature as particles and as electromagnetic waves.]
Lorber died in 1865 and wrote much of this stuff much earlier than that, at a time when it would have flatly contradicted all known science, and much of it would have seemed borderline insane. I find it more likely that the voice he was hearing came from a genuine source than from temporal lobe epilepsy. (All the Lorber quotes come from Kurt Eggenstein’s book The Unknown Prophet Jakob Lorber.)
Do you find it at all disturbing that you do not believe that the bible was changed through the years due to the telephone effect, yet at the same time, the man you use as proof of religious experience claims that the translations of the bible were ‘poor and incorrect’?
So, either the bible was not changed due to mistranslation or your boy Jakob is wrong.
FWIW, ITR, the argument you make for the legitimacy of da Costa’s witness is almost indentical to the one used by Muslims in favor of Mohammed.
And, I say again, if the God you worship really did torture da Costa to teach the rest of us a lesson, that’s a grotesque God. That she believed this to ease her way I can allow. The lady’s life sucked. To suppose she was actually right, though, is to posit a God not worth of worshop, IMHO.
You have, hopefully innocently, omitted a crucial word in the phrase I used: “a frugality of reliable evidence”. My OP presented numerous well-evidenced mechanisms whereby people filter their perceptions according to beliefs they already hold, such that science sadly cannot take such reports at face value. Like I said, myths are universal and inevitable - if these people had lived today and these episodes had occurred under more carefully controlled conditions, the evidence would be much more reliable.
Visions and seemingly external voices with religious themes are incredibly common phenomena, as any clinical psychologist will tell you. But when they are subject to careful inquiry, it turns out that no external source is necessary (though still possible).
Well, this will be the fourth time in this thread I’ve directed you to this paper on how the inner dialogue can be misattributed to an external source by mentally healthy individuals (as demonstrated by the referenced 1994 paper by, appropriately enough, Feelgood et al.!), such that AVH’s may form “part of normal as well as abnormal experience”. There are also numerous references to studies done on people while they were having such experiences, which show that the ‘voices’ can be ‘benign’ or ‘malignant’, such that the subject often characterised them as God/angels or Satan/demons. The externality of the voices is also utterly convincing to the subject – “that which is wholly other” is an accurate description of the subject’s perception. In short, both Alexandrina da Costa’s and Jakob Lorber’s experiences in general seem to follow this explanation closely.
You then go on to describe specific characteristics of each case which you feel remove them from the ambit of such explanations. (And indeed, I would agree with you if some of these things really happened.)
In Lorber’s case, we simply cannot know what academic subject matter he was subjected to (since even newspapers would carry enough to allow someone with eidetic memory to output surprisingly scholarly interpretations, and such people are themselves surprised what they can recall), but note that he was a teacher and would thus have access to significant scholarly and academic works anyway. And in the example you give, note that you are interpreting his words in hindsight! Who says a ‘solar region’ corresponds to a galaxy, or a ‘universe of universes’ to a supecluster, or a ‘large sun’ to a supermassive black hole (which is emphatically not a quasar, by the way)? Who says that a ‘cloudy envelope’ is an electron probability distribution, or that the magnification required to see one is a trillion (which is only correct if we generously allow the 6 orders of magnitude between the size of the nucleus and the furthest stable electronic orbitals to constitute the range)? You do, of course, many decades after the fact. Frankly, that whole passage is rather insubstantial freewheeling based on the already-established knowledge of the galaxy and the precursors to the periodic table, and that page is the best selection from the other 2000, less accurate (and some strongly anti-Semitic) pages of the Great Gospel of John. Do you consider them divinely inspired also, given that they contravened the canonical Gospels so gravely that all of Lorber’s writings were placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum? I simply do not see why you say this work must have been divinely inspired, since it reads just like the usual obscure poetry output by mystics the world over. Heck, even the EZW (Evangelical Church in Germany) proposes psychological explanations for Lorber’s revelations.
In da Costa’s case, we have claims of [ul]levitation[li]regular emergence from a state of quadriplegia[]survival for 12 years on apparently less than 100 calories per day[]cogent writing as an illiterate[/ul]Yes, of course these would be Nobel prizeworthy Gaps for God if they are really true. But, her paralysis was only gradual – it wasn’t a case of severing the spinal column when she jumped out of the window. One would expect some ability to move even after her condition had worsened such that she was bed-ridden. The claims of actual, clear-space-beneath-her levitation are not even explicitly made in your quote: “as if levitating” to me indicates her raising her pelvis – surprising in a bed-ridden woman, but not a literal Gap to be filled divinely. And this 3-hour Friday afternoon matinee performance of the stages of the Cross was apparently excruciating for her, as one would expect of someone whose spinal column was still intact and able to ferry pain messages. Nor was she illiterate, according to her official biography. So we are left with the miraculous survival on starvation rations, which reduced her to a mere 33 kilos – if God was sustaining her divinely, He was being careful to make sure she still clearly looked like someone starving to death. Again, we simply have no way of reliably establishing her precise daily calorie count, and can only look instead at similar cases today.[/li]
In short, historical cases do not provide enough reliable evidence to open up a clear Gap for which scientific explanations are inadequate. That you place such little trust in peer-reviewed rigour in today’s scientific journals but so much trust in anecdotal evidence from decades or centuries ago is, like I say, telling in itself.
And thanks for finding that readable version of the first part of Lorber’s “Great Gospel of John”, sleestak. No wonder it was banned - he’s basically saying the Bible is wrong, here’s how it really is! (It’s also interesting that at one point on p.256 he makes an outright falsifiable mistake: having himself - ie. Jesus - cause a total solar eclipse! The dialogue at this point is just laughable, really, with Jesus giving Matthew an education in astronomy as though he were a 19th Century schoolteacher.)
Great OP SentientMeat. From what you have posted here, it sounds like we come from very similar backgrounds. I traveled a path much like yours to atheism, one from a childhood of serious Protestantism that was shed through higher education. I too researched glossolalia and observational selection, and eventually became fascinated with cognitive science, in particular evolutionary psychology. You may be interested in the work of Pascal Boyer or other anthropologists and cognitive scientists who seek to explain religious or supernatural beliefs through the evolutionary pressures that shaped early hominids. It’s sort of intellectual masturbation - we can never really know the answers to most of the questions - but the endeavor is challenging and fun. May the gaps keep on shrinking.
You presume to speak for atheism now. Please don’t.
Science just helps explain what happens in the world. It gathers info, makes axioms and then can make predictions. It then watches to see if continuing evidence backs the theory. It can then become a law.
The theory of Creationism meets no such criteria. It conflicts with the evidence. It starts with an absurd premise and attempts to disparage all data that contradicts it. In no way does the theory of Creationism meet the rigors of even rudimentary science.
How does science have a starting premise of no god. That makes no sense. Science does not deal with god at all. It does not deal with the Easter Bunny of tooth fairy either. They also have nothing to do with science.
In fact, I have studied textual criticism of the Bible, the books I’ve read by professionals are The Text of the New Testament, by Dr. Bruce Metzger, The Historical Reliability of the Gospels, by Dr. Craig Blomberg, and Misquoting Jesus, by Dr. Bart Ehrman. So I would humbly submit that Im not totally clueless about issues like the ending of Mark’s Gospel, which is, in any case, clearly marked in any Bible that you’d buy in the local bookstore.
My basic conclusion about what to take home from these discussions is the same as that of Dr. Metzger, who said that no significant part of Christian doctrine is thrown into question by discrepancies between Bible manuscripts, for a number of reasons. The schlarly consensus has most of Paul’s letters within 20 years of Jesus’ death (yes I am aware that 1 Timothy and Hebrews and possibly a few other letters in the NT were probably not authored by the Apostles), Mark’s Gospel at 30-37 years after, Luke and Matthew at 40-50 years after, John at most 70 years after, and some scholars argue for earlier dates. This is in sharp contrast to what we have for many other ancient figures. For the Buddha, for instance, nothing was written within 2 centuries of his death, maybe 3. For the New Testament we have over 20,000 ancient manuscripts, including a decent number dating to the third or fourth century, and according to Dr. Metzger the early manuscripts are in agreement concerning 99.5% of the text.
As for the Jesus seminar, I’m afraid I can’t give much cred to them. Firstly they’re not a seminar, and they’re not all scholars. They took in members from everywhere, even from Hollywood. The member voted (!) on what is and isn’t historically accurate in the Gospels. If we’re suspicious that the Apostles may have projected their own wants and desires onto Jesus a few months or years after the fact, might we not also be worried that some folks might do the same two millenia after the fact?
Not really as religion specifically refers to it being a social construct. The underlying belief is irrelevant, it’s how a society coheres around the core belief that makes it a religion.
As you can see here what makes it a religion is it’s social forms and it’s appeal to a higher power. But that higher power can be as broad and vague as ‘Truth’. But as philosophy also appeals to truth, what separates it is that philosophy can be a purely individual endeavor whereas religion refers specifically to it as a communal endeavor.
All of the definitions pretty much refer either to something that binds people together, or to some type of ritual observance. The only thing that is vaguely individualistic is the reference to a monk or a nun, but as one is generally not considered a monk or a nun outside of a monastery or convent, the community aspect is still implied.
So it is possible for an atheist to be religious if they belong to some sort of covenant of atheists that have particular religious observances. This is why Communism is sometimes referred to as a civic or secular religion even though it is atheist. Most atheism as such generally diverges into some kind of other type of thing than strict atheism. Daoism and Buddhism are nominally atheistic, though some flavors do contain some form of polytheistic deism. They both rely more on practice than belief. Belief is not as important as being, ie, the relationship to truth as an activity rather than as mere observation.
So some religions can be atheistic, some can be theistic, but it’s incorrect to label either Deism or Atheism as being religions in and of themselves, they are merely categories of belief and not descriptors of a set of communally shared values and rituals.
ITR, as I said, I’m not going to try to debate this. For one thing, I’m not an expert. For another, my recollection of detail is somewhat dulled by the fact that I researched this (out of historical curiosity) something like eight years ago. FWIW, I read about a dozen books and dozens of websites. The two books I mentioned were just the ones I thought you would find most useful.
All I will add is that my final conclusion of what really happened, i.e., the historical basis of the Gospels, is like the Joshua scenario you described earlier, except without the physical resurrection and assuming only hundreds of followers (if that), not thousands. Why those followers continued to carry the torch is an interesting question, but not one we can answer from the scant data. In any event, ISTM, what sold Christianity as a prosceletizing religion wasn’t its historical veracity, which none of the potential converts were in a position to assess, but rather the appeal of the message, in particular the prospect of eternal life. As I argued in the prior thread, though, that the message is appealing doesn’t make it true. It doesn’t even count as evidence.
There are many gods that we can follow and worship, we get to chose. As such I have found only one worth of all my praise - that being Jesus. He didn’t fight for me but he took my death sentence on Himself and gave me His eternal life, gave me His Spirit - the spirit of The Father and allows me full assess to use His Name with the full authority that He Himself uses it.
There is just no contest, no other god has offered so much, so easily.
May the gaps keep on shrinking.