Christians and Politics: the Third Way

On the comments section to the post about Revolution in Jesus land, Andrew says

"Equating Christianity with particular political views is a folly of the left and the right."
I agree, this is a piece I wrote during the last presidential election as an answer to conservatives Christians I knew who were campaigning for Bush. I do not see the Jesus Land thing as defining a particular political formation as the Gospel. I see it as the alternative to doing so.

St. Augustine and Reinhold Neibhur, those scandalous liberals! Toward a Third way in the Culture Wars.


St. Augustine's name always comes up when feminists attack church fathers who said sexist things. By all accounts Augustine seems to have been one of the worst offenders. I've tired to point out to many feminists, of both secular and Christian ilk, that Augies words defended by feminist philosopher Geneva Lloyd in The Man Of Reason. Apprenlty Augustine was using some bizarre metaphorical reasoning and only used Eve as a derivation from Adam symbolically. But no one cares. It's so much easier just to write Augie off as a dead white male church guy who said stupid sexist things, let it go at that. Oddly enough even Augustine's best friends are not that willing to support everything he said. At one point my favorite prop at Perkins, and good friend William S. Babcock (major Augustine scholar) remarked "you don't have to accept it just because Augustine said it, in fact if Augustine said it there's a good chance its wrong." I think we were talking about free will at the time. But be that as it may, Augustine is loved by the right wing politicos of the Catholic church because he is used (wrongly) by a scholar name O'Connell to bolster the double edge sword of civil and religious authority; these hacks somehow think that this gives them the green light on their own social agenda. The deep irony here on both sides is that if one understood what Augustine really says in his massive tome The City of God (which was really just a letter to a friend, but thicker than the NY phone book) one would have to conclude that Augstine should be a comfort as well as a caution to both sides, the left and the right.

The City of God was written in response to the sacking of Rome by the Barbaric hordes in 410 AD. This situation left Christians in a dyer situation, since the Roman state under Constantine had worked up a connection between Christianity and God's blessing on the state that supported it. Constantine's PR man Eusebuis had so inculcated the idea that God was blessing Rome because it was turning to Christ, that Roman Christians had come to understand that their well being and the success of the Empire was all linked in support of the Christian agenda. All of this can be seen in elaborate detail in one my favorite books of all time, Christianity in Classical Culture, by Charles Norris Corcoran. It's an old book, written in the late 40's, Corcoran was at university of Toronto. He has a tendency to make certain aspects of the Rome of St. Augustine analogue to the cold war of the 1940s, viewing Constantine as a mild social democrat of somewhat liberal flavor--at least in terms of social programs. Another excellent and more up to date book which lays out a similar line of thinking is Christianity in the Roman World By S. Markus.

The Christians of early fith century Rome had come to be very selfish in their outlook. They saw themselves as God's chosen people, they alone had been given the right to extort obedience from other nations because they were doing God's will. Of course this was nothing more than the same old political philosophy of the Caesars who came before, the "reason of state argument." Constantine merely revitalized it in order to give the Roman morale a new shot in the arm. In the old pagan configuration, the Caesars were adding other nations to the matrix of civilization, doing them great favor by conquest, in spite of their ungrateful refusal to be taken. Constantine merely expanded this role, not only were they incorporating other people's into the matrix of civilization, (Corcoran' term, nothing to do with the movie) but they where also making the way clear for people to hear the Gospel, thus saving souls and expanding the kingdom. The Christians of that era came to understand their material success to be a direct blessing from God in exchange for their support of the political agenda.

The sack of Rome came as terrible news to these Christians, because suddenly God had withdrawn his favor. The pagans capitalized on this mishap by arguing that the old gods of Olympus had punished Rome for turning away from them. The Christians really had no answer because they had come to think so clearly that material riches meant divine favor. The destruction of material riches had to mean the removal of God's favor, or perhaps even the triumph or another god? Of course, the City of God is as thick as the New York Phone book, so pardon me if I give the short version: basically, Augustine argues that no temporal power arrangement can claim to be the city of God. Temporal power is an earthly thing it belongs to the city of man. The city of God and the City of Man are made for two different purposes and they have two different ends. The City of Man is Temporal and fleeting. It is not permanent and it is not holy. The City of God is permanent and Holy, and though the two exist one inside the other, the City of God inside the City of man, the City of God is everlasting and the City of man is not. Thus the temporal power can never claim to be the City of God. That means that Constantine did not set up a Christian state, and that Rome was never the commonwealth of God. No political agenda can ever be sacred and no temporal seat of power can ever claim to be the work of God on earth. Augustine totally severs the connection between temporal rewards and material success and eternal destiny.

Augustine was also a major influence upon modern political thinker and theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. Niebuhr is, oddly enough, another misunderstood figure who has been cast in the role of "neo-liberal." Far from being Neo-anything, Niebuhr was a self defined socialist until the day he died. I know this to be the case through my own association with his friend Frederic Carney. Niebuhr applied Augustine's dictum to modern cold war politics. While he did write "why is communism so evil?" and he was too slow in denouncing the war in Vietnam (waiting until almost the day he died in 1971) he was a tireless advocate of whomever needed advocating. He not only wrote "why is communism So Evil?" But the also went to bat to help defend the defendants in the Dennis vs. United States case, because he felt hat those representatives of the Communist Party USA were being rail roded. Niebuhr did not allow himself to be standoffish about the people he helped, and he did not try to enshrine the American effort in the cold war on the grounds that "we have to be as bad as they are to fight communism." His work Moral Man and Immoral Society pointed out the danger in thinking pointed to the errors in human wisdom when we try to project our own personal morality onto the group. We always wind up supporting things as a group that we would never condone as individuals, because we internalize the group interest and that overshadows our ability to think as free moral agents.

Niebuhr tried to cut a third course through the mine field of the American cold war. In the 1950s he fought a journal war against Billy Graham over the issue of Graham's anti-communist crusades. Graham argued that all one needed was a McCarthy like anti-communism and the "simple answer of the Gospel" and one could beat communism. Niebuhr argued that Graham's approach was simple minded; that we needed keen political analysis, and answer to social ills on our own side, and a more complex message than going down to the front at a Graham crusade. Graham won the war in the popular mind because it was easier for the common man to idneify with him and his answers seemed more "clear cut" (if not more simplistic). Niebuhr, of course, won the respect of his colleagues for standing up to the crowd, there was never any danger of Billy Graham besting Reinhold Niebuhr in an intellectual debate, but this was the McCarthy era. Niebuhr's attempt at steering a third course (Debsian socialism is socialism but divorced from Marxist Leninist philosophy) never panned out in the American mind. The cold war sucked all other forms of thinking into a black hole in which it was possible only to be community, or anti-communist. There were other attempts at a third way, however, but they wound up in the same swamp of indifference. The Papal office tried through several Popes to run a third way political solution through Christian Democrat parties. This met with mixed results, sometimes good government in West Germany, sometimes support for the death Squads in El Salvador. Overall the Pope (JPII) had much more success helping to destabilize communism than he did in founding a third way.

But what other avenue should we expect in the political arena? We should expect to fail to starting a concrete third alternative since that would mean setting up a new agenda for temporal power. The strength of the City of God (the Kingdom of God) does not arise from temporal political power. The church is a priori the third way. When we try to forge a concrete political alliance by uniting the Gospel to anyone political agenda we miss the point and merely re-create Constantine's mistake.The City of God is not about holding temporal power, the city of man is not the city of God and cannot claim to have the anointing of God. No political party can calim to be the part of God; and by contrast, the other party is not the "party of sin." Both or all political parties are just confused humans looking for historically bound power arrangements and hoping desperately that this will make their lives better. In some senses it will, it will also make something worse. These are unavoidable realities of the world. We cannot cast the aura of the sacred over the temporal and claim victory foe the Knudson of God!


Now we are ensconced in a kind of cold war in the church. Another enemy has been thrust upon us, one we don't' understand very well, but it remains to be seen what becomes of that conflict. But in the church the new cold war is not about that, it is about the social changes inaugurated in the 1960s which still continue today; it is about the Reagan era and the moral majority and the new republican party which somehow never quite says it is the party of God, but somehow one gets that feeling. The cold war is the culture war, "liberal" vs. "conservative." But for "liberal" read, pro gay, pro feminist, pro abortion, for "conservative" read prayer in schools, teaching creationism in schools, keeping gays and feminists out of everything and supposedly ending abortion; the short answer; Democrat vs. Republican, blue country vs. Red country. The blue/red split in the church (it's so confusing being blue after being red so long) is mainly about the role of women and gays. These are the issues that seem galvanism both sides.

Liberals are so despised and rejected by American society that there isn't a single liberal talk show on PBS. Charley Rose is what passes for a liberal and he is an avoid conservative Republican who openly camping for Reagan. Somehow, he is what passes for liberal, and he actually does a pretty good job of substituting for one. The media is reviled by the conservatives as the "dreaded liberal media" but if one were to read Noam Chomsky books one would see what a joke that is (Manufacturing Consent). There are two media watchdog groups, one left, (FAIR, Fairness and accuracy in Reporting) one Right (AIM, Acruacy in Media). Having studied both and having been a local organizer for FAIR my own bias is that FAIR makes a much better case for a conservative media than does AIM for a liberal media. The media is solidly in the hands of the conservatives, especially the news media. About the only place "liberals" really rule in the media now are on cit cons, where the husband is always a bumbling fool and the wife is the only competent person and the husband is a bit afraid of her and she's always proven right. The liberal tinge to the cultural side of the media is probably what leads many think of the media as liberal. But that is just what Marcuse called the "carnation on the lapell of capitalism."

The Evangelical movement, since tasting real political power a couple of times, well almost, have become more despondent and feel more surrounded than ever before. Seeing the utter failure of the old patriarchal hierarchy in Western civilization they founder and desperately grab at deck chairs while the vast unsinkable titanic of guideline Age America goes under. Of course this means in reality that they are closer to political control than ever. The only way to get a conservative to move into political action is to convenes him that he's surrounded. So the more defeated and desperate the conservatives believe their cause to be, the more one can be sure they are winning. But the outcome either way will be bad for the Gospel. The Gospel is not the city of man. Taking temporal power can never be the fulfillment of God's will, not in the long run.

The Gospel should always be the third way. It was the third way when it came out in the time of Christ; neither Jew nor Greek. In other words, not Hebrew and not pagan. It was the third way in the cold war, as there was a vast Christian left history which is usually pretty much ignored and unknown in conservative churches, but it still exists. Figures like Dorothy Day and Mother Jones were real Christians and really did fight for workers and the poor. The Gospel must be the third way because it is not the City of Man, it cannot be a temporal political agenda, and the temporal political power cannot be confused with the gospel doctrine and moral view points are essential in following the Gospel, but the Gospel is much more than just sound doctrine. There is also the matter of living out our sound doctrine and how we treat people is a large part of that.

We cannot make a Christian Democrat party, as some have tried, because that's jut playing the world's game. To be effective in helping people in the world for the Gospel, we can at times enter the political arena. We can enter on either side, and we should never lose sight of the fact that real Christians who really love the Lord are on both sides. Niebuhr once said that we demonize the other because we see in him our own temporal minded pretensions. We must remember as we play the politics game that the other guy is playing the same game, he/she may have the same motives we have and we must recognize that fact. That realization could be to laud the other, or it could be to convict ourselves. We must take seriously Paul's talk about party spirit and realize that this is never more a danger than when one becomes involved in political parties.

Finally, Now we are finally getting somewhere

file footage on "hippie" Christians


Revoltution in Jesus Land

this is a blog about something I've been waiting to see happen for a long time. I'll let the author tell you about it from the page of that blog itself.

Elizabeth and I have been traveling the country for the past few months working on a couple of different projects. Right away, we kept bumping into these amazing communities of “progressive evangelical” Christians—that is, people who hold a lot of progressive (even radical) political views, but who believe in an almost fundamentalist theology. It’s a huge movement—possibly of up to twenty million active participants. And so I decided to start this blog as way of explaining it to my secular progressive friends and colleagues back in DC.

I have been watching this “Revolutionary Christian” scene for a couple years already. Honestly, I thought I was exaggerating its size when I was trying to get my friends excited about it. But, as it turns out, it’s far bigger than I ever imagined.

When Elizabeth and I got married, I started going to church with her. We were in North Carolina then, and explored many different non-denominational and charismatic evangelical churches. I was shocked at how radical they were when it came to social-economic issues. They all seemed to be whipped up in the beginnings of some sort of conscious mass return to the spirit of Early Christianity—of leaving your wealth behind, not just helping the poor but joining the poor, adopting kids lost in the foster system and HIV+ babies, etc….

Only small handfuls of people in the congregations were actually doing those kinds of things, but they were being held up as the ideal, while the preachers relentlessly laid down the new/ancient theology of building “the Kingdom of Heaven” here on Earth, and of a Jesus who is “the God of the poor and oppressed.”

For me, surprise turned to feverish curiosity when a mostly upper-middle class/suburban/Republican mega-church had a sermon, based on the New Testament Epistle to the Colossians, that railed against the “Empire” of Pax Americana—the empire of “might makes right” and idolatrous consumerism.

People are finally getting tried of pretense and want to be Christians for real. Me too! sounds great. I want to join them!

thanks to Tim for the info on this.

The Thomas Reid Argument

Thomas Reid (1710-1796)

This argument was not made by Reid, I named it in his honor; the basic argument about epistemology was inspired by his work. This arguments answers any possible basis for a brain/mind argument against the previous argument. It also answers any epistemological fallacy that could raised against any God argument. The background assumption of this argument is the huge body of empirical data supporting the value of religious experiences.

Philosopher, born in Strachan, Aberdeenshire, NE Scotland, UK. He studied at Aberdeen, becoming professor there in 1751, and later succeeded Adam Smith in the chair of moral philosophy at Glasgow (1764–80). He was leader of the ‘Scottish’ school, which rejected the scepticism of David Hume. His main publications include Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (1785) and Essays on the Active Powers of Man (1788).

see also Thomas Reid Studies

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Argument:

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(1) No empirical evidence can prove the existence of the external world, other minds, or the reality of history, or other such basic things.

(2) We do not find this epistemological dilemma debilitating on a daily basis because we assume that if our experiences are consistent and regular, and if they are shared to the extent that others confirm our understanding to a large extent, than we can navigate in "reality" whether it is ultimately illusory of not.

(3) Consistency,regularity, and a somewhat shared nature of personal experience is the key.

(4) religious experience can also be regular and consistent, perhaps not to the same degree, but in the same way.

(5) Inter subjective

RE of this type has a commonality shared by believers all over the world, in different times and diffrent places, just as the external world seems to be perceived the same by everyone.

(6) real and Lasting effects.


(7) therefore, we have as much justification for assuming religious belief based upon experince as for assuming the reality of the external world or the existence of other minds.


See note on the Thomas Reid project and Reid himself end page 2

*We assume reality by means of a judgment

*we make such judgments based upon certain criteria

*Because RE fits the same criteria we are justified in making the same assumption; ie that these experiences are indicative of a reality.

VIII. The Thomas Reid Argument.

A. How do we Know the external world exists?

Philosophers have often expressed skepticism about the external world, the existence of other minds, and even one's own existence. Rene Descartes went so far as to build an elaborate system of rationalism to demonstrate the existence of the external world, beginning with his famous cogito, "I think, therefore, I am." Of course, he didn't really doubt his own existence. The point was to show the method of rationalism at work. Nevertheless, this basic point, that of epistemology (how we know what we know) has always plagued philosophy. It seems no one has ever really given an adequate account. But the important point here is not so much what philosophers have said but what most people do. The way we approach life on a daily basis the assumptions we make about the external world. Skeptics are fond of saying that it is irrational to believe things without proof. I would argue that they, an all of us, believe the most crucial and most basic things without any proof whosoever, and we live based upon those assumptions which are gleaned with no proof of their veracity at all!

B. Consider Thomas Reid's Common Sense Philosophy of Foundatinalism and Fallibalism.

The point of departure here is Reid's discussion of Hume and the problem of justification of the external world. This is discussed in lecture notes of a contemporary philosopher, G.J. Mattey, in his lecture notes.

1) Skepticism about the External World

Thomas Reid
Theory of Knowledge lecture notes.
G.J. Mattey
Philosophy, UC Davis

"Consider the question whether we are justified in believing that a physical world exists. As David Hume pointed out, the skepticism generated by philosophical arguments is contrary to our natural inclination to believe that there are physical objects." "[T]he skeptic . . . must assent to the principle concerning the existence of body, tho' he cannot pretend by any arguments of philosophy to maintain its veracity. Nature has not left this to his choice, and has doubtless esteem'd it an affair of too great importance to be trusted to our uncertain reasonings and speculations. We may well ask, What causes induce us to believe in the existence of body?, but 'tis in vain to ask, Whether there be body or not? That is a point, which we must take for granted in all our reasoning." (A Treatise of Human Nature, Book I, Part IV, Section II)

"Nonetheless, after considering the causes of our belief in the existence of body and finding them inadequate for the justification of that belief, Hume admitted to be drawn away form his orignal assumption that bodies exist. 'To be ingenuous, I feel myself at present . . . more inclin'd to repose no faith at all in my senses, or rather imagination, than to place in it such an implicit confidence,' because ''tis impossible upon any system to defend either our understanding or senses." His solution to these doubts was "carelessness and in-attention,' which divert the mind from skeptical arguments."

2) Reid's Defense of Commonsense Beliefs.

Mattey again:

"Thomas Reid, who was a later contemporary of Hume's, claimed that our beliefs in the external world are justified.'I shall take it for granted that the evidence of sense, when the proper circumstances concur, is good evidence, and a just ground of belief' (Essay on the Intellectual Powers of Man, Essay IV, Chapter XX). This evidence is different from that of reasoning from premises to a conclusion, however."

"That the evidence of sense is of a different kind, needs little proof. No man seeks a reason for believing what he sees or feels; and, if he did, it would be difficult to find one. But, though he can give no reason for believing his senses, his belief remains as firm as if it were grounded on demonstration. Many eminent philosophers, thinking it unreasonable to believe when the could not shew a reason, have laboured to furnish us with reasons for believing our senses; but their reasons are very insufficient, and will not bear examination. Other philosophers have shewn very clearly the fallacy of these reasons, and have, as they imagine, discovered invincible reasons agains this belief; but they have never been able either to shake it themselves or to convince others. The statesman continues to plod, the soldier to fight, and the merchant to export and ijmport, without being in the least moved by the demonstations that have been offered of the non-existence of those things about which they are so seriously employed. And a man may as soon by reasoning, pull the moon out of her orbit, as destroy the belief of the objects of sense." (Essay on the Intellectual Powers of Man, Essay IV, Chapter XX)

"Here Reid shows himself to have foundationalist tendencies, in the sense that our beliefs about physical objects are not justified by appeal to other beliefs. On the other hand, all he has established at this point is what Hume had already observed, that beliefs about physical objects are very hard to shake off. Hume himself admitted only to lose his faith in the senses when he was deeply immersed in skeptical reflections. But why should Reid think these deeply-held beliefs are based on "good evidence" or "a just ground?" One particularly telling observation is that a philosopher's "knowledge of what really exists, or did exist, comes by another channel [than reason], which is open to those who cannot reason. He is led to it in the dark, and knows not how he came by it" (Essay on the Intellectual Powers of Man, Essay IV, Chapter XX). Philosophers "cannot account for" this knowledge and must humbly accept it s a gift of heaven."

"If there is no philosophical account of justification of beliefs about the physical world, how could Reid claim that they are justified at all? The answer is the way in which they support common sense."

"Such original and natural judgments [based on sense-experience] are, therefore, a part of that furniture which Nature hath given to the human understanding. They are the inspiration of the Almighty, no less than our notions or simple apprehensions. They serve to direct us in the common affairs of life, where our reasoning faculty would leave us in the dark. They are part of our constitution; and all the discoveries of our reason are grounded upon them. They make up what is called the common sense of mankind; and, what is manifestly contrary to any of those first principles, is what we call absurd. (An Inquiry into the Human Mind, Chapter VII, Section 4)"

"One might say that judgments from sense-experience they are justified insofar as they justify other beliefs we have, or perhaps because they are the output of a perceptual system designed by God to convey the truth. (Of course, if the latter is what gives these beliefs their justification, the claim that we are designed in this way needs to be justified as well.)"

C. In other words, We accept the existence of the external world as a matter of course merely because we perceive it.

1) Acceptance of Perceptions about the world.

But it is not merely because we percieve it that we accept it. It is because we perceive it in a particular sort of way. Because we perceive it in a regular and consistent way. This has been stated above by Reid. The common man goes on with his lot never giving a second thought to the fact that he can no more prove the veracity of the things around him than he can the existence of God or anything else in philosophy. Yet we accept it, as does the skeptic demanding his data, while we live out our lives making these assumptions all the time.

2) Consistency and Regularity.

If every time we woke up in the morning it was in a different house, with a different family, but one which make the assumption that we did nevertheless belong there and always had, and if the route to work changed every morning, if we never went to the same job twice, if our names and our looks were always different each day, we might think less of direct observation. But because these things are always the same from moment to moment and they never differ, we learn to trust them and we trust them implicitly as a matter of course. We do not try to prove to our selves each day when we get up "I am the same person today that I was yesterday," precisely because we learn very early that we always are the same person. We observe early on that we cannot penetrate physical objects without leaving holes and so we do not try to walk though walls; we know that doesn't work because it never works.

Hume observed that when we see two billiard balls we do not really see the cause of one making the other one move. What we really observe is one stopping and the other one starting. But, in practical terms, we do not observe the causality of a car running over the pedestrian as causing the pedestrian to fly across the road, but we know from experience that these two factors usually go hand in hand and so we don't play in the street.

a) Empirical proof?

In making this argument on boards many skeptics have argued "I see that the world is real with my own eyes." That's the point, why trust your eyes? You cannot prove they are seeing things properly. Everything could be an illusion everything we observe could be wrong. We cannot prove the existence of the external world, we assume it because it is always there. Some try to claim this direct observation as empirical proof. But they are confusing the notion of scientific empiricism with epistemological empiricism. Before we make the assumption that scientific data is valid we first make the epistemological assumption that perception is valid. Otherwise there would be no point in assuming the data. So epistemological empiricism is prior to scientific methods. In fact we have to simply make this assumption a priori with no proof and no way around the problem in order to able to make the assumptions necessary to accept scientific data. WE do usually make these assumptions, but they are assumptions none the less.

b) Science cannot prove reality.
Still others try to content that empirical scientific evidence proves the reality of the external world. But of course if the world were an illusion than any scientific evidence we gather would be part of the illusion as well. So there is no other way to demonstrate the truth of the external world, the existence of other minds, or the reality of our own existence except through the consistency and regularity of our sense data.

God argument: argument from religious experience

With this argument I hurl down the gauntlet to John Loftus for formal debate.



Overview:


Decision Making Paradigm: logic of the lamp post"

AT the heart of all religious belief and all organized religions is experience and the sense of the numinous. This is the foundation of religious belief. If we are going to argue for God it would behoove us to examine the nature of this sense of the numinous.

The logic of the lamp post is this: we can't find our keys in the dark. We look under lamp post even if we did not drop them there because that is where we will find them. We can't find God in sense data, because God is not given in sense data. So we look in place we will find him, personal experience. Since this is the basis of religious belief it makes sense to look there.

Co-determinate: The co-determinate is like the Derridian trace, or like a fingerprint. It's the accompanying sign that is always found with the thing itself. In other words, like trailing the inviable man in the snow. You can't see the inviable man, but you can see his footprints, and wherever he is in the snow his prints will always follow.

We cannot produce direct observation of God, but we can find the "trace" or the co-determinate, the effects of God in the world.

Now how do we know the co-determinate? Schleiermacher saw it as the feeling of utter dependence, because the object or correlates of having such a feeling was the thing that evokes the feeling. Just feelings of sublimity imply that one encounters the sublime, feelings of love imply that there is a beloved, so feelings of utter dependence imply that there is a universal necessity upon which the live world and worlds are supremely utterly dependent. We can also include mystical experince and life transformation because these are part and parcel of what is meant by the idea of religion and the divine. As far back as we can dig for artifacts we seem to find some form of mystical experince at the heart of all organized religion. So we can conclude that God, religion, and life transformation always go hand in hand. The studies themselves tell us that life transformation always accompanies dramatic experiences which are understood as and which evoke a strong sense of the Holy. Is this really phenomenological? We can screw up our phenomenological credentials by responding to it in a non phenomenological way. But it is the product of the phenomenological method, because it derives from observation of the phenomena and allowing the phenomena to tell us what categories to group the data into.





The only question at that point is "How do we know this is the effect, or the accompanying sign of the divine? But that should be answerer in the argument below. Here let us set out some general perameters:

(1) The trace produced content with specifically religious affects

(2)The affects led one to a renewed sense of divine reality, are trans formative of life goals and self actualization

(3) Cannot be accounted for by alternate causality or other means.

_________________________________
this is the actual argument,

Argument:



(1)There are real affects from Mystical experince.

(2)These affects cannot be reduced to naturalistic cause and affect, bogus mental states or epiphenomena.

(3)Since the affects of Mystical consciousness are independent of other explanations we should assume that they are genuine.

(4)Since mystical experince is usually experince of something, the Holy, the sacred some sort of greater transcendent reality we should assume that the object is real since the affects or real, are that the affects are the result of some real higher reality.

(5)The true measure of the reality of the co-determinate is the transfomrative power of the affects. Since those are real we can assume the apparent cause is real.

___________________________________

Analysis:
Real Affects of Mystical Experience Imply Co-determinate

A. Study and Nature of Mystical Experiences

Mystical experince is only one aspect of religious experince, but I will focuses on it in this argument. Most other kinds of religious experience are difficult to study since they are more subjective and have less dramatic results. But mystical experince can actually be measured empirically in terms of its affects, and can be compared favorably to other forms of conscious states.

1) Primarily Religious

Trans personal Childhood Experiences of Higher States of Consciousness: Literature Review and Theoretical Integration (unpublished paper 1992 by Jayne Gackenback


http://www.sawka.com/spiritwatch/cehsc/ipure.htm

Quotes:

"The experience of pure consciousness is typically called "mystical". The essence of the mystical experience has been debated for years (Horne, 1982). It is often held that "mysticism is a manifestation of something which is at the root of all religions (p. 16; Happold, 1963)." The empirical assessment of the mystical experience in psychology has occurred to a limited extent."

2) Defining characteristics.

[Gackenback]

"In a recent review of the mystical experience Lukoff and Lu (1988) acknowledged that the "definition of a mystical experience ranges greatly (p. 163)." Maslow (1969) offered 35 definitions of "transcendence", a term often associated with mystical experiences and used by Alexander et al. to refer to the process of accessing PC."

Lukoff (1985) identified five common characteristics of mystical experiences which could be operationalized for assessment purposes. They are:

1. Ecstatic mood, which he identified as the most common feature;
2. Sense of newly gained knowledge, which includes a belief that the mysteries of life have been revealed;
3. Perceptual alterations, which range from "heightened sensations to auditory and visual hallucinations (p. 167)";
4. Delusions (if present) have themes related to mythology, which includes an incredible range diversity and range;
5. No conceptual disorganization, unlike psychotic persons those with mystical experiences do NOT suffer from disturbances in language and speech.
It can be seen from the explanation of PC earlier that this list of qualities overlaps in part those delineated by Alexander et al.


3)Studies use Empirical Instruments.

Many skeptics have argued that one cannot study mystical experince scientifically. But it has been done many times, in fact there are a lot of studies and even empirical scales for measurement.

(Ibid.)

Quote:

"Three empirical instruments have been developed to date. They are the Mysticism Scale by Hood (1975), a specific question by Greeley (1974) and the State of Consciousness Inventory by Alexander (1982; Alexander, Boyer, & Alexander, 1987). Hood's (1975) scale was developed from conceptual categories identified by Stace (1960). Two primary factors emerged from the factor analysis of the 32 core statements. First is a general mysticism factor, which is defined as an experience of unity, temporal and spatial changes, inner subjectivity and ineffability. A second factor seems to be a measure of peoples tendency to view intense experiences within a religious framework. A much simpler definition was developed by Greeley (1974), "Have you ever felt as though you were very close to a powerful, spiritual force that seemed to lift you out of yourself?" This was used by him in several national opinion surveys. In a systematic study of Greeley's question Thomas and Cooper (1980) concluded that responses to that question elicited experiences whose nature varied considerably. Using Stace's (1960) work they developed five criteria, including awesome emotions; feeling of oneness with God, nature or the universe; and a sense of the ineffable. They found that only 1% of their yes responses to Greeley's question were genuine mystical experiences. Thus Hood's scale seems to be the more widely used of these two broad measures of mysticism. It has received cross cultural validation" (Holm, 1982; Caird, 1988).

4) Incidence.

(Ibid.)

Quote:

"Several studies have looked at the incidence of mystical experiences. Greeley (1974) found 35% agreement to his question while Back and Bourque (1970) reported increases in frequency of these sorts of experiences from about 20% in 1962 to about 41% in 1967 to the question "Would you say that you have ever had a 'religious or mystical experience' that is, a moment of sudden religious awakening or insight?" Greeley (1987) reported a similar figure for 1973".

"The most researched inventory is the State of Consciousness Inventory (SCI; reviewed in Alexander, Boyer, and Alexander, 1987). The authors say "the SCI was designed for quantitative assessment of frequency of experiences of higher states of consciousness as defined in Vedic Psychology (p. 100)."

"In this case items were constructed from first person statements of practitioners of that meditative tradition, but items were also drawn from other authority literatures. Additional subscales were added to differentiate these experiences from normal waking experience, neurotic experience, and schizophrenic experience. Finally, a misleading item scale was added. These authors conceptualize the "mystical" experience as one which can momentarily occur in the process of the development of higher states of consciousness. For them the core state of consciousness is pure consciousness and from it develops these higher states of consciousness.

Whereas most researchers on mystical experiences study them as isolated or infrequent experiences with little if any theoretical "goal" for them, this group contextualizes them in a general model of development (Alexander et al., 1990) with their permanent establishment in an individual as a sign of the first higher state of consciousness. They point out that "during any developmental period, when awareness momentarily settles down to its least excited state, pure consciousness [mystical states] can be experienced (p. 310). " In terms of incidence they quote Maslow who felt that in the population at large less than one in 1,000 have frequent "peak" experiences so that the "full stabilization of a higher stage of consciousness appears to an event of all but historic significance (p. 310)."

"Virtually all of researchers using the SCI are very careful to distinguish the practice of meditation from the experience of pure consciousness, explaining that the former merely facilitates the latter. They also go to great pains to show that their multiple correlation's of health and well-being are strongest to the transcendent experience than to the entire practice of meditation (for psychophysiological review see Wallace, 1987; for individual difference review see Alexander et al., 1987;

The point of all of this is that the long term positive effects of mystical consciousness demonstrate for themselves the divine in action in the world. The argument is not that we can't figure out how such effects are caused. This is not an explanation of something based upon an appeal to God ,as the atheist straw man would have it. That's the only way atheists know how to think about things. We know this is caused by brain chemistry that's not the issue. That doesn't' tel us anything because it could be just a matter of random evolution, or it could be that this is how God creates corporeal life, he use chemicals links for consciousness. That is not at issue. The issues is that nothing else can produce such effects. It is God's action because nothing else will produce these effects to this degree.

at that level questions of causation do come int o it but as ex post facto argument on counter causality.


B. Long-Term Positive Effects of Mystical Experience


what follows is a summary of the major studies. The data is gathered by subjecting subjects whose experiences are measured by Hood's "M scale" (mystical scale) to standardized personality tests and demographics. We seen in these first examples high ratings of self actualization for mystical experiences. Self actualization tests are standardized and form a measurable base in psychological research. Essentially it means how comfortable you are with being you. In these results we see those who have had religious experiences score much higher than those who have not.




Research Summary

From Council on Spiritual Practices Website

"States of Univtive Consciousness"


Also called Transcendent Experiences, Ego-Transcendence, Intense Religious Experience, Peak Experiences, Mystical Experiences, Cosmic Consciousness. Sources:

Wuthnow, Robert (1978). "Peak Experiences: Some Empirical Tests." Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 18 (3), 59-75.

Noble, Kathleen D. (1987). ``Psychological Health and the Experience of Transcendence.'' The Counseling Psychologist, 15 (4), 601-614.
Lukoff, David & Francis G. Lu (1988). ``Transpersonal psychology research review: Topic: Mystical experiences.'' Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 20 (2), 161-184.

Roger Walsh (1980). The consciousness disciplines and the behavioral sciences: Questions of comparison and assessment. American Journal of Psychiatry, 137(6), 663-673.

Lester Grinspoon and James Bakalar (1983). ``Psychedelic Drugs in Psychiatry'' in Psychedelic Drugs Reconsidered, New York: Basic Books.

Furthermore, Greeley found no evidence to support the orthodox belief that frequent mystic experiences or psychic experiences stem from deprivation or psychopathology. His ''mystics'' were generally better educated, more successful economically, and less racist, and they were rated substantially happier on measures of psychological well-being. (Charles T. Tart, Psi: Scientific Studies of the Psychic Realm, p. 19.)



Long-Term Effects

Wuthnow:

*Say their lives are more meaningful,
*think about meaning and purpose
*Know what purpose of life is
Meditate more
*Score higher on self-rated personal talents and capabilities
*Less likely to value material possessions, high pay, job security, fame, and having lots of friends
*Greater value on work for social change, solving social problems, helping needy
*Reflective, inner-directed, self-aware, self-confident life style

Noble:

*Experience more productive of psychological health than illness
*Less authoritarian and dogmatic
*More assertive, imaginative, self-sufficient
*intelligent, relaxed
*High ego strength,
*relationships, symbolization, values,
*integration, allocentrism,
*psychological maturity,
*self-acceptance, self-worth,
*autonomy, authenticity, need for solitude,
*increased love and compassion

Short-Term Effects (usually people who did not previously know of these experiences)

*Experience temporarily disorienting, alarming, disruptive
*Likely changes in self and the world,
*space and time, emotional attitudes, cognitive styles, personalities, doubt sanity and reluctance to communicate, feel ordinary language is inadequate

*Some individuals report psychic capacities and visionary experience destabilizing relationships with family and friends Withdrawal, isolation, confusion, insecurity, self-doubt, depression, anxiety, panic, restlessness, grandiose religious delusions

Links to Maslow's Needs, Mental Health, and Peak Experiences When introducing entheogens to people, I find it's helpful to link them to other ideas people are familiar with. Here are three useful quotations. 1) Maslow - Beyond Self Actualization is Self Transcendence ``I should say that I consider Humanistic, Third Force Psychology to be transitional, a preparation for a still `higher' Fourth Psychology, transhuman, centered in the cosmos rather than in human needs and interest, going beyond humanness, identity, selfactualization and the like.''

Abraham Maslow (1968). Toward a Psychology of Being, Second edition, -- pages iii-iv.



2) States of consciousness and mystical experiences
The ego has problems:
the ego is a problem.

``Within the Western model we recognize and define psychosis as a suboptimal state of consciousness that views reality in a distorted way and does not recognize that distortion. It is therefore important to note that from the mystical perspective our usual state fits all the criteria of psychosis, being suboptimal, having a distorted view of reality, yet not recognizing that distortion. Indeed from the ultimate mystical perspective, psychosis can be defined as being trapped in, or attached to, any one state of consciousness, each of which by itself is necessarily limited and only relatively real.'' -- page 665

Roger Walsh (1980). The consciousness disciplines and the behavioral sciences: Questions of comparison and assessment. American Journal of Psychiatry, 137(6), 663-673.



3) Therapeutic effects of peak experiences

``It is assumed that if, as is often said, one traumatic event can shape a life, one therapeutic event can reshape it. Psychedelic therapy has an analogue in Abraham Maslow's idea of the peak experience. The drug taker feels somehow allied to or merged with a higher power; he becomes convinced the self is part of a much larger pattern, and the sense of cleansing, release, and joy makes old woes seem trivial.'' -- page 132

Lester Grinspoon and James Bakalar (1983). ``Psychedelic Drugs in Psychiatry'' in Psychedelic Drugs Reconsidered, New York: Basic Books.




Transpersonal Childhood Experiences of Higher States of Consciousness: Literature Review and Theoretical Integration. Unpublished paper by Jayne Gackenback, (1992)
http://www.sawka.com/spiritwatch/cehsc/ipure.htm

"These states of being also result in behavioral and health changes. Ludwig (1985) found that 14% of people claiming spontaneous remission from alcoholism was due to mystical experiences while Richards (1978) found with cancer patients treated in a hallucinogenic drug-assisted therapy who reported mystical experiences improved significantly more on a measure of self-actualization than those who also had the drug but did not have a mystical experience. In terms of the Vedic Psychology group they report a wide range of positive behavioral results from the practice of meditation and as outlined above go to great pains to show that it is the transcendence aspect of that practice that is primarily responsible for the changes. Thus improved performance in many areas of society have been reported including education and business as well as personal health states (reviewed and summarized in Alexander et al., 1990). Specifically, the Vedic Psychology group have found that mystical experiences were associated with "refined sensory threshold and enhanced mind-body coordination (p. 115; Alexander et al., 1987)."




(4) Greater happiness


Religion and Happiness

by Michael E. Nielsen, PhD


Many people expect religion to bring them happiness. Does this actually seem to be the case? Are religious people happier than nonreligious people? And if so, why might this be?

Researchers have been intrigued by such questions. Most studies have simply asked people how happy they are, although studies also may use scales that try to measure happiness more subtly than that. In general, researchers who have a large sample of people in their study tend to limit their measurement of happiness to just one or two questions, and researchers who have fewer numbers of people use several items or scales to measure happiness.

What do they find? In a nutshell, they find that people who are involved in religion also report greater levels of happiness than do those who are not religious. For example, one study involved over 160,000 people in Europe. Among weekly churchgoers, 85% reported being "very satisfied" with life, but this number reduced to 77% among those who never went to church (Inglehart, 1990). This kind of pattern is typical -- religious involvement is associated with modest increases in happiness



Argyle, M., and Hills, P. (2000). Religious experiences and their relations with happiness and personality. The International Journal for the Psychology of Religion, 10, 157-172.

Inglehart, R. (1990). Culture shift in advanced industrial society. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

The Religious A Priori

Argument:

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

(1) Scientific reductionism loses phenomena by re-defining the nature of sense data and qualia.

(2)There are other ways of Knowing than scientific induction

(3) Religious truth is apprehended phenomenologically, thus religion is not a scientific issue and cannot be subjected to a materialist critque

(4) Religion is not derived from other disciplines or endeavors but is a approch to understanding in its own right

Therefore, religious belief is justified on its own terms and not according to the dictates or other disciplines


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

In my dealings with atheist in debate and dialog I find that they are often very committed to an empiricist view point. Over and over again I hear the refrain "you can't show one single unequivocal demonstration of scientific data that proves a God exists." This is not a criticism. It's perfectly understandable; science has become the umpire of reality. It is to scientific demonstration that we appear for a large swath of questions concerning the nature of reality. The problem is that the reliance upon empiricism has led to forgetfulness about the basis of other types of questions. We have forgotten that essentially science is metaphysics, as such it is just one of many approach that can be derived from analytical reasoning, empiricism, rationalism, phenomenology and other approaches.


Problem with Empiricism


Is empirical evidence the best or only true form of knowledge? This is an apologetics question because it bears upon the arguments for the existence of God.

Is lack of empirical evidence, if there is a lack, a draw back for God arguments?
I deny that there is a lack, but it has to be put in the proper context. That will come in future threads, for this one I will bracket that answer and just assume there no really good empirical evidence (even though I think there is).

I will ague that empiricism is not true source of knowledge by itself and logic is more important.

True empirical evidence in a philosophical sense means exact first hand observation. In science it doesn't really mean that, it implies a more truncated process. Consider this, we drop two balls of different size from a tower. Do they fall the same rate or the bigger one falls faster? They are supposed to fall at the same rate, right? To say we have empirical proof, in the literal sense of the term we would have to observe every single time two balls are dropped for as long as the tower exists. We would have to sit for thousands of years and observe millions of drops and then we couldn't say it was truly empirical because we might have missed one.

That's impractical for science so we cheat with inductive reasoning. We make assumptions of probability. We say we observed this 40,000 times, that's a tight correlation, so we will assume there is a regularity in the universe that causes it to work this way every time. We make a statistical correlation. Like the surgeon general saying that smoking causes cancer. The tobacco companies were really right, they read their Hume, there was no observation of cause and effect, because we never observe cause and effect. But the correlation was so tight we assume cause and effect.

The ultimate example is Hume's billiard balls. Hume says we do not see the cause of the ball being made to move, we only really see one ball stop and the other start. But this happens every time we watch, so we assume that the tight correlation gives us causality.

The naturalistic meta physician assumes that all of nature works this way. A tight correlation is as good as a cause. So when we observe only naturalistic causes we can assume there is nothing beyond naturalism. The problem is many phenomena can fall between the cracks. One might go one's whole life never seeing a miraculous event, but that doesn't mean someone else doesn't observe such things. All the atheist can say is "I have never seen this" but I can say "I have." Yet the atheist lives in a construct that is made up of his assumptions about naturalistic c/e and excluding anything that challenges it. That is just like Kuhns paradigm shift. The challenges are absorbed into the paradigm until there are so many the paradigm has to shit. This may never happen in naturalism.

So this constructed view of the world that is made out of assumption and probabilities misses a lot of experience that people do have that contradicts the paradigm of naturalism. The thing is, to make that construct they must use logic. After all what they are doing in making the correlation is merely inductive reasoning. Inductive reasoning has to play off of deductive reasoning to even make sense.

Ultimately then, "empiricism" as construed by naturalist (inductive probabilistic assumptions building constructs to form a world view) is inadequate because it is merely a contsuct and rules out a prori much that contradicts.


The A priori


God is not given directly in sense data, God transcends the threshold of human understanding, and thus is not given amenable to empirical proof. As I have commented in previous essays (blogspots) religion is not a scientific question. There are other methodologies that must be used to understand religion, since the topic is essentially inter-subjective (and science thrives upon objective data). We can study religious behavior through empirical means and we can compare all sorts of statistical realizations through comparisons of differing religious experiences, behaviors, and options. But we cannot produce a trace of God in the universe through "objective" scientific means. Here I use the term "trace" in the Derision sense, the "track," "footprint" the thing to follow to put us on the scent. As I have stated in previous essays, what we must do is find the "co-determinate," the thing that is left by God like footprints in the snow. The trace of God can be found in God's affects upon the human heart, and that shows up objectively, or inter-subjectively in changed behavior, changed attitudes, life transformations. This is the basis of the mystical argument that I use, and in a sense it also have a bearing upon my religious instruct argument. But here I wish to present anther view of the trace of God. This could be seen as a co-determinate perhaps, more importantly, it frees religion from the structures of having to measure up to a scientific standard of proof: the religious a priori.

Definition of the a priori.


"This notion [Religious a priori] is used by philosophers of religion to express the view that the sense of the Divine is due to a special form of awareness which exists along side the cognitive, moral, and aesthetic forms of awareness and is not explicable by reference to them. The concept of religion as concerned with the awareness of and response to the divine is accordingly a simple notion which cannot be defined by reference other than itself." --David Pailin "Religious a priori" Westminster Dictionary of Christian Theology (498)



The religious a priori deals with the spacial nature of religion as non-derivative of any other discipline, and especially it's spacial religious faculty of understanding which transcends ordinary means of understanding. Since the enlightenment atheist have sought to explain away religion by placing it in relative and discardable terms. The major tactic for accomplishing this strategy was use of the sociological theory of structural functionalism. By this assumption religion was chalked up to some relative and passing social function, such as promoting loyalty to the tribe, or teaching morality for the sake of social cohesion. This way religion was explained naturalistically and it was also set in relative terms because these functions in society, while still viable (since religion is still around) could always pass away. But this viewpoint assumes that religion is derivative of some other discipline; it's primitive failed science, concocted to explain what thunder is for example. Religion is an emotional solace to get people through hard times and make sense of death and destruction (it's a ll sin, fallen world et). But the a priori does away with all that. The a priori says religion is its own thing, it is not failed primitive sincere, nor is it merely a crutch for surviving or making sense of the world (although it can be that) it is also its own discipline; the major impetus for religion is the sense of the numinous, not the need for explanations of the natural world. Anthropologists are coming more and more to discord that nineteenth century approach anyway.

Thomas A Indianopolus
prof of Religion at of Miami U. of Ohio

Cross currents


"It is the experience of the transcendent, including the human response to that experience, that creates faith, or more precisely the life of faith. [Huston] Smith seems to regard human beings as having a propensity for faith, so that one speaks of their faith as "innate." In his analysis, faith and transcendence are more accurate descriptions of the lives of religious human beings than conventional uses of the word, religion. The reason for this has to do with the distinction between participant and observer. This is a fundamental distinction for Smith, separating religious people (the participants) from the detached, so-called objective students of religious people (the observers). Smith's argument is that religious persons do not ordinarily have "a religion." The word, religion, comes into usage not as the participant's word but as the observer's word, one that focuses on observable doctrines, institutions, ceremonies, and other practices. By contrast, faith is about the non observable, life-shaping vision of transcendence held by a participant..."



The Skeptic might argue "if religion as this unique form of consciousness that sets it apart form other forms of understanding, why does it have to be taught?" Obviously religious belief is taught through culture, and there is a good reason for that, because religion is a cultural construct. But that does not diminish the reality of God. Culture teaches religion but God is known to people in the heart. This comes through a variety of ways; through direct experience, through miraculous signs, through intuitive sense, or through a sense of the numinous. The Westminster's Dictionary of Christian Theology ..defines Numinous as "the sense of awe in attracting and repelling people to the Holy." Of course the background assumption I make is, as I have said many times, that God is apprehended by us mystically--beyond word, thought, or image--we must encode that understanding by filtering it through our cultural constructs, which creates religious differences, and religious problems.

The Culturally constructed nature of religion does not negate the a priori. "Even though the forms by Which religion is expressed are culturally conditioned, religion itself is sui generis .. essentially irreducible to and indistinguisable from the non-religious." (Paladin). Nor can the a priori be reduced to some other form of endeavor. It cannot be summed up by the use of ethics or any other field, it cannot be reduced to explanation of the world or to other fields, or physiological counter causality. To propose such scientific analysis, except in terms of measuring or documenting effects upon behavior, would yield fruitless results. Such results might be taken as proof of no validity, but this would be a mistake. No scientific control can ever be established, because any study would only be studying the culturally constructed bits (by definition since language and social sciences are cultural constructs as well) so all the social sciences will wind up doing is merely reifying the phenomena and reducing the experience. In other words, This idea can never be studied in a social sciences sense, all that the social sciences can do is redefine the phenomena until they are no longer discussing the actual experiences of the religious believer, but merely the ideology of the social scientist (see my essay on Thomas S. Kuhn.

The attempt of skeptics to apply counter causality, that is, to show that the a priori phenomena is the result of naturalistic forces and not miraculous or divine, not only misses the boat in its assumptions about the nature of the argument, but it also loses the phenomena by reduction to some other phenomena. It misses the boat because it assumes that the reason for the phenomena is the claim of miraculous origin, “I feel the presence of God because God is miraculously giving me this sense of his presence.” While some may say that, it need not be the believers argument. The real argument is simply that the co-determinates are signs of the trace of God in the universe, not because we cant understand them being produced naturalistically, but because they evoke the sense of numinous and draw us to God. The numinous implies something beyond the natural, but it need not be “a miracle.” The sense of the numinous is actually a natural thing, it is part of our apprehension of the world, but it points to the sublime, which in turn points to transcendence. In other words, the attribution of counter causality does not, in and of itself, destroy the argument, while it is the life transformation through the experience that is truly the argument, not the phenomena itself. Its the affects upon the believer of the sense of Gods presence and not the sense of Gods presence that truly indicates the trance of God.

Moreover, the attempts to reduce the causality to something less than the miraculous also lose the phenomena in reification.William James, The Verities of Religious Experience (The Giford Lectures):

"Medical materialism seems indeed a good appellation for the too simple-minded system of thought which we are considering. Medical materialism finishes up Saint Paul by calling his vision on the road to Damascus a discharging lesion of the occipital cortex, he being an epileptic. It snuffs out Saint Teresa as an hysteric, Saint Francis of Assisi as an hereditary degenerate. George Fox's discontent with the shams of his age, and his pining for spiritual veracity, it treats as a symptom of a disordered colon. Carlyle's organ-tones of misery it accounts for by a gastro-duodenal catarrh. All such mental over-tensions, it says, are, when you come to the bottom of the matter, mere affairs of diathesis (auto-intoxications most probably), due to the perverted action of various glands which physiology will yet discover. And medical materialism then thinks that the spiritual authority of all such personages is successfully undermined."

This does not mean that the mere claim of religious experience of God consciousness is proof in and of itself, but it means that it must be taken on its own terms. It clearly answers the question about why God doesn't reveal himself to everyone; He has, or rather, He has made it clear to everyone that he exists, and He has provided everyone with a means of knowing Him. He doesn't get any more explicit because faith is a major requirement for belief. Faith is not an arbitrary requirement, but the rational and logical result of a world made up of moral choices. God reveals himself, but on his own terms. We must seek God on those terms, in the human heart and the basic sense of the numinous and in the nature of religious encounter. There are many aspects and versions of this sense, it is not standardized and can be describes in many ways:

Forms of the A priori.

Schleiermacher's "Feeling of Utter Dependence.

Frederick Schleiermacher, (1768-1834) in On Religion: Speeches to it's Cultured Disposers, and The Christian Faith, sets forth the view that religion is not reducible to knowledge or ethical systems. It is primarily a phenomenological apprehension of God consciousness through means of religious affections. Affections is a term not used much anymore, and it is easily confused with mere emotion. Sometimes Schleiermacher is understood as saying that "I become emotional when I pay and thus there must be an object of my emotional feelings." Though he does vintner close to this position in one form of the argument, this is not exactly what he's saying.

Schleiermacher is saying that there is a special intuitive sense that everyone can grasp of this whole, this unity, being bound up with a higher reality, being dependent upon a higher unity. In other words, the "feeling" can be understood as an intuitive sense of "radical contingency" (int he sense of the above ontological arguments).He goes on to say that the feeling is based upon the ontological principle as its theoretical background, but doesn't' depend on the argument because it proceeds the argument as the pre-given pre-theoretical pre-cognitive realization of what Anslem sat down and thought about and turned into a rational argument: why has the fools said in his heart 'there is no God?' Why a fool? Because in the heart we know God. To deny this is to deny the most basic realization about reality.

Rudolph Otto's Sense of the Holy (1868-1937)

The sense of power in the numinous which people find when confronted by the sacred. The special sense of presence or of Holiness which is intuitive and observed in all religious experience around the world.

Paul Tillich's Object of Ultimate Concern.

We are going to die. We cannot avoid this. This is our ultimate concern and sooner or latter we have to confront it. When we do we realize a sense of transformation that gives us a special realization existentially that life is more than material.

see also My article on Toilet's notion of God as the Ground of Being.

Tillich's concept made into God argument.

As Robert R. Williams puts it:

There is a "co-determinate to the Feeling of Utter dependence.



"It is the original pre-theoretical consciousness...Schleiermacher believes that theoretical cognition is founded upon pre-theoretical inter subjective cognition and its life world. The latter cannot be dismissed as non-cognitive for if the life world praxis is non-cognitive and invalid so is theoretical cognition..S...contends that belief in God is pre-theoretical, it is not the result of proofs and demonstration, but is conditioned solely by the modification of feeling of utter dependence. Belief in God is not acquired through intellectual acts of which the traditional proofs are examples, but rather from the thing itself, the object of religious experience..If as S...says God is given to feeling in an original way this means that the feeling of utter dependence is in some sense an apparition of divine being and reality. This is not meant as an appeal to revelation but rather as a naturalistic eidetic"] or a priori. The feeling of utter dependence is structured by a correlation with its whence." , Schleiermacher the Theologian, p 4.



The believer is justified in assuming that his/her experiences are experiences of a reality, that is to say, that God is real.

Freedom from the Need to prove.

Schleiermacher came up with his notion of the feeling when wrestling with Kantian Dualism. Kant had said that the world is divided into two aspects of reality the numinous and the phenomenal. The numinous is not experienced through sense data, and sense God is not experienced through sense data, God belongs only to the numinous. The problem is that this robs us of an object of theological discourse. We can't talk about God because we can't experience God in sense data. Schleiermacher found a way to run an 'end round' and get around the sense data. Experience of God is given directly in the "feeling" apart form sense data.

This frees us form the need to prove the existence of God to others, because we know that God exists in a deep way that cannot be entreated by mere cultural constructs or reductionist data or deified phenomena. This restores the object of theological discourse. Once having regained its object, theological discourse can proceed to make the logical deduction that there must be a CO-determinate to the feeling, and that CO-determinate is God. In that sense Schleiermacher is saying "if I have affections about God must exist as an object of my affections"--not merely because anything there must be an object of all affections, but because of the logic of the co-determinate--there is a sense of radical contingency, there must be an object upon which we are radically contingent.

Do Atheist Understand the Process of Give and Take In Argument?

I've been sent comments so far that my previous piece (only been up one night and has not yet even seen the sun rise--I write this at 5:48 am) is "angry" and "unintelligent." One said "you call that a response." This makes me have to ask "do these guys really know what think is? Do they understand what a real exchange of views is?" The paradigm that in which I grew up calls for th expression of a view and the response consisting of counter arguments that call into question the thesis of the previous view. Yet atheists seem to be grossly offended by this. There are basically three responses they seem to give:

(1) Anger and incredulity that anyone would argue with them at all

(2) Some kind of general truth by stipulation position whereby they try and privilege their position above all others with no backing evidence or reasons for the special nature of their view (special pleading).

(3) or a general all purpose argument that says "Christianity is bad because it has hurt people, cases X, Y, Z (usually the crusades, witch trails, and some try to include the holocaust because they stupidly try to lump Hitler in as a Christian, so of course all Christians are guilty if hone is guilty of something), then any argument tot he existence of God or truth of the Bible is met with "but that can't be true because of cases x,y, and z."

Loftus' style is a combination of all three. He starts with a sort of "are you still beating your wife" kind of argument--God is stupid and the bible's a pile of crap and any argument form them is automatically wrong because those these "facts." That's his basic approach. Then he follow it up trying to psychologize the person with whom he is arguing. We see this in the things he says question my motivations and trying to "understand" how I can possibly believe it.

He is totally of my response below. I can't understand why they have a problem here. My basic approch in defending my atonement piece was this:

(1) support for the view point among major theologians

(2) an analysis of the nature of theological positions derived from scripture and including my own as an example of the valid sort.

(3) Pointing out his lack of proof and evidence.

(4) showing what's wrong with the way he tries to deal with my arguments

(5) showing the inadequacy of his approach since he basically pretended my entire view was nothing more than one aspect which was a small part of my view. this allowed him to reflect upon the inadequacy of the proposal but it was truncated and missed the over all point.

To all of this he says it's insulting and bad and it's much of a response and he wonders if dialogging with me is worth. what are they offended by? what are they talking about? its as though the act of disagreement is seen as some kind of big crime. ON their blog they try to portray me as someone who can't tolerate the views of others. why? Because I don't like them panning ideas and methods that I learned n seminary when they know nothing about them.

when you tell them "but you don't know anything about theology" they say "whats' to know? it's stupid because God is made up." I think they deeply offended by thought. They are very simplistic and they have to have things their way and if anyone disagrees they come unglued. Their only understanding of philosophical dialog is rage and incredulity.

In all of this Loftus has not given one single argument based upon evidence. He hasn't dealt with a single passage. He hasn't presented the views of any theologians or scholars. His entire criticism was based upon the the assumption of theodicy and reduction of my view to one aspect (participatory suffering) as inadequate and then ignores huge portions the view, totally misses the redemptive and transformational aspects.

I also put up a ton of material on empirical studies documenting the transformative effects of religious experience. This was completely ignored as though it isn't there but they will, I'm sure, go on asserting that religion has no positive effect or benefit.

Incredibly after all of that he puts through a comment to the effect that my response was angry, inadequate, lacking in any substance. I just have to wonder if he has a clear idea of what we are supposed to be doing here.

Who are these strange people who are filled with hatred and indignation at the faith of others but who can't be bothered to learn anything about it? Why should we try to deal with them when they can't argue without personal invective? Strange angry people who can't concentrate upon a complex idea.

Response to Loftus on Theory of atonement

On the Debuncking Christianity blog, Loftus attacks my understanding of the atonement. But he demonstrates the totally disingenuous nature of his views:

Over at Metacrock's Blog Joe takes evangelical atonement theories to task and then offers his own, called Participatory Atonement. According to him "Christ died in Solidarity with victims." I both "love" and "hate" liberal theologies. I love them because they argue with me against evangelical Christianity. I hate them because they are used to maintain a faith that doesn't make a difference and cannot be rationally defended as being specifically Christian. Here's my response to his atonement theory....

This is disingenuous because he wants to present liberal theology as an alternative. but in circular reasoning, the alternative is still just er zots Christianity and fundism is the standard by which all Christianity must be judged. Then he uses circular reasoning to argue against liberalism. LIberal ism beats us fundiism, so far so good. then liberalism itself is picked off becasue it doesn't match up to the standard of fundism so now there's no Christianity that matters.A beats B but A loses because it isn't B. that's nuts!

As my brother once said, "Stalin was the best thing that ever happened to communism he had the right idea." The Tort he was arguing with said "but he killed all the members of the Comentern" my brother says "well they were just a bunch of no good commies weren't they?" Of course his assertions about Christianity are circular becasue he has presented no evidence of any thing, In fact they are disproved by liberal theology since they only apply to fundamentalism.

Your answer is cherry-picking and choosing from the Bible, it doesn't sufficiently answer the question why Jesus suffered, nor does it answer the problem of evil, nor does it answer the problems of the incarnation and the trinity.

I've already taken him to task for this. Calling my piece "cherry picking" is the lowest form of playing to gallery and the most unfair attempt to evoke fear of experts. I will present more data to indicate the breadth of my view, but Loftus presents nothing He makes the charge groundless and baseless and does nothing to prove it. As so many atheists, their main methodology is to construct a hermeneutic of suspicion, and to assert truth by stipulation after special pleading for the privilege of their view over all others. They never do anything to earn any of this they just assert it.

Cherry picking implies that one is just looking for the passages that support one's view and ignoring those that do not. Is that what I'm really doing? Of course Loftus presents no argument and no evidence to support that he merely asserts it because it's the atheist bromide that one uses anytime liberal biblical scholarship comes up. Its' their way of saying "we are not sophisticated enough to ddeal with real scholarships but we can dismiss this with a one liner.k"

The fact is all groups and schools of thought have a canon within the canon, a key set of verses that they use to define all verses. This is done in any body of literature where people have set views about differences of interpretation. The fundamentalists do it of course. I have never heard of an evangelical group that prays for the dead. Evangelicals use Paul as the key and not Jude or James which are probably anti-Paul. The problem is Loftus treats all forms of hermeneutics as though they are verbal plenary inspiration. He can't understand any other means of interpretation. He approaches liberalism as though it is just another version of fundamentalism. Thus, I think he expects every single verse to be dealt with in a literal fashion. Fundism is just as much "cherry picking" as anything. The whole concept of textual criticism requires that one seek the best reading and exclude wrong ones so that is "cherry picking." So what? Loftus does not come to terms with the passages I present and he gives no reason to reject them as the key to understanding.

"Cherry picking" implies a highly selective view which ignores other views. The participatory atonement idea that I discussed is not incompatible with most modern theological view points on the atonement, and I listed three major modern theologians who push it: Whiteley, Mostlmann, and Lamb. One really must read Whitely's book Theology of Saint Paul (circa 1965) especially the chapter on participatory atonement. It's a complex and brilliant chapter in which Whiteley (then one of the top Pupaline scholars in the world, based at Oxford) explicated the concept in dealing with almost all New Testament passages and major portions of the OT in terms of scape goat and blood sacrifice. he finds that the atonement is not continuation of blood sacrifice. The OT images of the sacrifice and the goat might be symbolic foreshadowing but the atonement is not an upgraded version of temple sacrifice. The same view has also been held by Origin and Clement of Alexandra. Similar views can be found in the works of N.T. Wright as discussed by Mark Home:

But why should “Messiah” bear such an incorporative sense? Clearly, because it is enemic in the understanding of kingship, in many societies and certainly in ancient Israel, that the king and the people are bound together in such a way that what is true of the one is true in principle of the other.

Wright elaborates:

In Romans 6.11, the result of being baptized “into Christ”… is that one is now “in Christ,” so that what is true of him is true of the one baptized–here, death and resurrection. This occurs within the overall context of the Adam-Christ argument of chapter 5, with its two family solidarities; the Christian has now left the old solidarity (Romans 6.6) and entered the new one. 6.23 may be read by analogy with 6.11; whose who are “in Christ” receive the gift of the life of the new age, which is already Christ’s in virtue of his resurrection–that is, which belongs to Israel’s representative, the Messiah in virtue of his having drawn Israel’s climactic destiny on to himself. Similarly, in Romans 8.1, 2 the point of the expression “in Christ” is that what is true of Christ is true of his people: Christ has come through the judgment of death and out into the new life which death can no longer touch (8.3-4; 8.10-11), and that is now predicated of those who are “in him.” In Galatians 3.26 the ex-pagan Christians are told that they are all sons of God (a regular term for Israel…) in Christ, through faith. It is because of who the Messiah is–the true seed of Abraham, and so on–that Christians are this too, since they are “in” him. Thus in v. 27, explaining this point, Paul speaks of being baptized “into” Christ and so “putting on Christ,” with the result that (3.28) [translating Wright’s reproduction of Paul’s Greek here:] you are all one in Christ Jesus. It is this firm conclusion, with all its overtones of membership in the true people of God, the real people of Abraham, that is then expressed concisely in 3.29 with the genitive [again translating]: and if you are of Christ… When we consider Galatians 3 as a whole, with its essentially historical argument from Abraham through Moses to the fulfillment of God’s promises in the coming of Christ, a strong presupposition is surely created in faovor both of reading Xpistos as “Messaiah,” Israel’s representative, and of understanding the incorporative phrases at the end of the chapter as gaining their meaning from this sens. Because Jesus is the Messiah, he sums up his people in himself, os that what is true of him is true of them (pp. 47-48; boldface added).

Wright's view is not exactly like mine since the assumes assumes of ancient Hebrew Christians in a literal Adam and starts the whole process form the stand point of Adam as a literal figure. But the point where he and I are the same is in the notion of participation. We participate in Christ's hope and future, as he participates in our suffering and death. We in his death and he in ours, we in his resurrection and he in our new life.

Moreover, the bible reflects many different views of atonement. Lofuts is approach it i as a fudnie when he expects just one view to be reflected in all verses. If this is not what he expects then what the heck does he think he's saying when he speaks of "cherry picking." But the Bible never issues a single metaphor for all ideas of atonement. At times Paul uses all of the major views as illustrations, which is where most of them come from. Financial transaction is embedded in the notion of redemption (to buy back) and Paul uses propitiation (turn away wrath) and solidarity. We are free to pick our metaphors because it's not an inerrant memo form the boss.It's a reflection of human encounters with the divine. We approach inspiration from the author's side of the street, not from God's side. We see the inspirational through the eyes of a human author who doesn't understand any more than we do. Its' a testimony not a stone tablet. We are free to pick our metaphors especially since Paul used so many of them.


John does actually attempt to deal with some issues:

The best way for God to show his solidarity with victims is to do for them what he commands YOU to do, and that is to help them out of their misery rather than to suffer with them.

This is actually a pretty good point, of course it's also begging the question because it doesn't take seriously any sort of testimony, of which Church is over stocked, of how God actually does help people. I have already proposed a pretty plausible theory as to why God doesn't just call a halt to the whole mess and make everyone's life beautiful. My theory of Soteriological Drama explains that God can't really just call off the world and make everything good because the original point of creation would be thwarted. The original point being to create free moral agents who willingly choose the good. But to willingly choose the good we have to search in our hearts otherwise we would resent God's imposition upon our free will. We must internalize the values of the good, which can only come with a search in the heart for truth. Given that the world has to be this way (see the link) what God does makes the most sense. He gives us ways to find help and find truth and interline the values and be at peace. Loftus can't appreciate the complexity of the situation. He can only think in terms of the blatantly obvious:

If I chose to go to jail with you in order to participate in your sufferings, for instance, then how does that help you? It might make you feel better about your sufferings, but it should instead make you question my sanity. Can you actually imagine my helping any victims in tangible ways by suffering with them, especially if, like God, I had the power to alleviate their suffering and didn't?

Because Of course I didn't say God is just going through the motions of experiencing our pain. I said the atonement is a symbol of the solidarity between God and humanity.That solidarity includes risk and pain it is not limited to just feeling pain and that's the whole magic of it. Of course out of the solidarity's the ground of forgiveness is created. He's assuming that God can call off the "experiment" and change the fundamental nature of things regardless of the original logic of creation. But that is what we would say form our limited human perspective because we are suffering. But we have to consider the big picture, which atheists aren't willing to do. they want their way at all costs and they are more important than God, truth, justice, goodness or anything else!

If like Process Theologians your God doesn't have that kind of power, then neither does he have the power to help victims by suffering with them.

Process God does not lack the power to help people. That is the kind of bs understanding of process that comes form fundamentalists. That's not a process guy's understanding. God of process theology is not a big guy in the sky. "he" can't stop us from suffering because there is no "he" to understand. Its' more like a God principle than the God of the bible. Atheists are like children who want to experince growing up without falling off the bike or skinning the knee for the first time. They have problems considering complex answers to age old problems.

Why should victims care for God if all he can do is to suffer with them?

At this point we must observe that Loftus has merely reduced by views on the atonement to an easy to dismiss formula which distorts the actual ideas. He's gotten fixated on the concept of God suffering with us and that's all the can comprehend. I now where said all God can do is suffer with is. that is his twisting of the issues. Of course its his his usual m.o. of begging the question. He is merely ignoring the help that God gives, refusing to believe it and discounting all the testimonies. Instead he uses the opportunity to get a school boy giggle at an irreverent approach to authority:

He's impotent.(meaning God)

now hold on to your hats for some major question begging and circular reasoning. Loftus is about to show us what it means to make bold assertions!

Besides, he got us into this mess in the first place by selfishly creating us for his own pleasure with our evil tendencies. What good does it show you that God loves you if he cannot do anything for you except to suffer with you? Big deal, I would say. Do something about our suffering and then I'll be impressed, and then I'll care, and then I'll think God knows what he's doing.

God got us into this mess by giving us life and letting us live in the world. typical child's rejection of the parents "I didn't ask to be born." He boldly assumes that God created us for "selfish pleasure." Who says God created us for any kind of pleasure? Now he pretend to understand the mystery of mysteries. But of course leave it to him to think love is selfish. Of course this is all just imposition of his fantasy world. This is what fundie Loftus understood from the old time gospel hour rather than any kind of real biblical data. Atheists are always just imposing whatever view of Christianity they struggling with before giving up and assuming that is the ture way and the only ay to be a Christian.

It's obvious to me Joe, that you're working from within a given Christian tradition that if you weren't already inside of it, you wouldn't come to accept it in the first place.

You haven't the slightest idea where I've been or what I've been though.

This is so obvious to me. You initially became a Christian because you thought otherwise of the atonement, but with further study you rejected that initial evangelical atonement view, for good reasons. But rather than rejecting your faith, you try desperately to hang on to it by replacing it with something you never would've accepted in the first place.

You have no concept of what its' about. this is so hilarious. I showed you the link to my testimony on Doxa. Anyone reading that should be able to see that I was totally revolutionized by a life chaning experince that blew me away. this is why I have to laugh at talk like "God doesn't help us with our suffering" that's just crap. I have been helped by God with my suffering. You have no concept of anything.

Its' really stupid to think that the view of I've developed has anything to do with rejecting the idea of forgiveness of sin. Is ay quite clearly that it creates the ground upon which sins are forgiven. that's one of its strongest selling points. It actually explains in rational terms why and how atonement works to forgive sins. I don't see how you could miss that. Rather than being some kind of last ditch effort to hang on to faith it's the product of a vital strong growing faith. It's the outcome of close relationship with God and the hall mark of a superior theological education. I was riding tall in the saddle of theology and belief when I came up with that view point. I didn't make it up, it was the product of Matthew Lamb in his book Solidarity with Victims.

Do you notice he has not talked about any ideas of the view I discussed? notice he has done nothing but try to psycholgoize me and use third rate psychology at that. Atheists are so unable to think. They are such little mind raping brown shirts they can't actually deal with issues of logic, and all they can is try and manipulate feelings.

(1) it's all about feelings for them.

they hate God because they are angry and they want their way. So they think it all revolves around how you feel and if you get what you want or not.


(2)their only defense is special pleading

they can't actually deal with the ins and outs of theology so all they can do is some major mind rape tactics like talk about theodicy and then everything after that is just manipulation.

This answer is picking and choosing from the Bible, it doesn't sufficiently answer the question why Jesus suffered, nor does it answer the problem of evil, nor does it answer the problems of the incarnation and the trinity.

Yea obviously it does. The idea of the message of solidarity explains explains totally why Jesus suffered. What's not to explain? He suffered to identify with humanity and human ends and goals. what's the problem with that? Lotus doesn't' actually try to argue it. He's just doing truth by stipulation again.


Loftus puts all his arguments in one tired refrain, that just suffering with us is not enough. Of course this has nothing to do with my view. He's just ignoring what participatory atonement is all about. He deals with not one single issue of any text or any concept other than this. He gives no arguments merely stipulations. He totally ignores all I said about us being in Christ's resurrection. We participate in Christ's hope and future. That's why resurrection is a metaphor for the glorious new life we find in Christ, complete with healing and power for living. All of this eludes Loftus completely. I don't think that as a Christian he had much of a concept of the life in the spirit or the power of God..

Talk about Cherry picking? He's just ceasing on one tiny aspect with which to propagandize and sloganize and totally ignoring what the piece was about. The difference between my view of atonement and the others is that mine turns not upon the actual killing of Christ preforming some quasi mysterious cleansing then in a half assed attempt to explain what that means one falls back upon simplistic human notions like buying back or taking one's place in an execution. But these views just can't explain why one should take one's place or what that would do for the guilt of the one substituted. With my view Christ's death is a statement due to the situation he put himself in, and we are not in need to explain some mysterious connection, but merely to except the straight forward meaning of the message stated: God is on our side, if we are on God's side we participate in Christ's hope just as he participated in lot as humans. This is exactly what Paul says:

...all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were Baptized into his death.? We were therefore buried with him in baptism into death in order that just as Christ was raised from the death through the glory of the father, we too may live a new life. If we have been united with him in his death we will certainly be united with him in his resurrection.For we know that the old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be rendered powerless, that we should no longer be slaves to sin.--because anyone who has died has been freed from sin.Now if we have died with Christ we believe that we will also live with him, for we know that since Christ was raised from the dead he cannot die again; death no longer has mastery over him; the death he died to sin he died once for all; but the life he lives he lives to God. In the same way count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus.(Romans 6:1-5)

When we accept God's statement that he is on our side, we are on God's side. This creates teh ground of forgiveness and we are saved, we have new life we share in the resurrection life. This is well documented in scientific empirical studies, the trans formative effects of religious experince. Lofuts assertions of Christ atonement doin gus no good because God just sufferers with us and nothing more could not be further from the truth. It is a proven fact that religion is more than just dead unimportant thing that doesn't help you but that religious experience competently revitalizes one's life:



Research Summary

From Council on Spiritual Practices Website

"States of Univtive Consciousness"

Also called Transcendent Experiences, Ego-Transcendence, Intense Religious Experience, Peak Experiences, Mystical Experiences, Cosmic Consciousness. Sources:

Wuthnow, Robert (1978). "Peak Experiences: Some Empirical Tests." Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 18 (3), 59-75.

Noble, Kathleen D. (1987). ``Psychological Health and the Experience of Transcendence.'' The Counseling Psychologist, 15 (4), 601-614.
Lukoff, David & Francis G. Lu (1988). ``Transpersonal psychology research review: Topic: Mystical experiences.'' Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 20 (2), 161-184.

Roger Walsh (1980). The consciousness disciplines and the behavioral sciences: Questions of comparison and assessment. American Journal of Psychiatry, 137(6), 663-673.

Lester Grinspoon and James Bakalar (1983). ``Psychedelic Drugs in Psychiatry'' in Psychedelic Drugs Reconsidered, New York: Basic Books.

Furthermore, Greeley found no evidence to support the orthodox belief that frequent mystic experiences or psychic experiences stem from deprivation or psychopathology. His ''mystics'' were generally better educated, more successful economically, and less racist, and they were rated substantially happier on measures of psychological well-being. (Charles T. Tart, Psi: Scientific Studies of the Psychic Realm, p. 19.)



Long-Term Effects

Wuthnow:

*Say their lives are more meaningful,
*think about meaning and purpose
*Know what purpose of life is
Meditate more
*Score higher on self-rated personal talents and capabilities
*Less likely to value material possessions, high pay, job security, fame, and having lots of friends
*Greater value on work for social change, solving social problems, helping needy
*Reflective, inner-directed, self-aware, self-confident life style

Noble:

*Experience more productive of psychological health than illness
*Less authoritarian and dogmatic
*More assertive, imaginative, self-sufficient
*intelligent, relaxed
*High ego strength,
*relationships, symbolization, values,
*integration, allocentrism,
*psychological maturity,
*self-acceptance, self-worth,
*autonomy, authenticity, need for solitude,
*increased love and compassion

Short-Term Effects (usually people who did not previously know of these experiences)

*Experience temporarily disorienting, alarming, disruptive
*Likely changes in self and the world,
*space and time, emotional attitudes, cognitive styles, personalities, doubt sanity and reluctance to communicate, feel ordinary language is inadequate

*Some individuals report psychic capacities and visionary experience destabilizing relationships with family and friends Withdrawal, isolation, confusion, insecurity, self-doubt, depression, anxiety, panic, restlessness, grandiose religious delusions

Links to Maslow's Needs, Mental Health, and Peak Experiences When introducing entheogens to people, I find it's helpful to link them to other ideas people are familiar with. Here are three useful quotations. 1) Maslow - Beyond Self Actualization is Self Transcendence ``I should say that I consider Humanistic, Third Force Psychology to be transitional, a preparation for a still `higher' Fourth Psychology, transhuman, centered in the cosmos rather than in human needs and interest, going beyond humanness, identity, selfactualization and the like.''

Abraham Maslow (1968). Toward a Psychology of Being, Second edition, -- pages iii-iv.



2) States of consciousness and mystical experiences
The ego has problems:
the ego is a problem.

``Within the Western model we recognize and define psychosis as a suboptimal state of consciousness that views reality in a distorted way and does not recognize that distortion. It is therefore important to note that from the mystical perspective our usual state fits all the criteria of psychosis, being suboptimal, having a distorted view of reality, yet not recognizing that distortion. Indeed from the ultimate mystical perspective, psychosis can be defined as being trapped in, or attached to, any one state of consciousness, each of which by itself is necessarily limited and only relatively real.'' -- page 665

Roger Walsh (1980). The consciousness disciplines and the behavioral sciences: Questions of comparison and assessment. American Journal of Psychiatry, 137(6), 663-673.



3) Therapeutic effects of peak experiences

``It is assumed that if, as is often said, one traumatic event can shape a life, one therapeutic event can reshape it. Psychedelic therapy has an analogue in Abraham Maslow's idea of the peak experience. The drug taker feels somehow allied to or merged with a higher power; he becomes convinced the self is part of a much larger pattern, and the sense of cleansing, release, and joy makes old woes seem trivial.'' -- page 132

Lester Grinspoon and James Bakalar (1983). ``Psychedelic Drugs in Psychiatry'' in Psychedelic Drugs Reconsidered, New York: Basic Books.




Transpersonal Childhood Experiences of Higher States of Consciousness: Literature Review and Theoretical Integration. Unpublished paper by Jayne Gackenback, (1992)
http://www.sawka.com/spiritwatch/cehsc/ipure.htm

"These states of being also result in behavioral and health changes. Ludwig (1985) found that 14% of people claiming spontaneous remission from alcoholism was due to mystical experiences while Richards (1978) found with cancer patients treated in a hallucinogenic drug-assisted therapy who reported mystical experiences improved significantly more on a measure of self-actualization than those who also had the drug but did not have a mystical experience. In terms of the Vedic Psychology group they report a wide range of positive behavioral results from the practice of meditation and as outlined above go to great pains to show that it is the transcendence aspect of that practice that is primarily responsible for the changes. Thus improved performance in many areas of society have been reported including education and business as well as personal health states (reviewed and summarized in Alexander et al., 1990). Specifically, the Vedic Psychology group have found that mystical experiences were associated with "refined sensory threshold and enhanced mind-body coordination (p. 115; Alexander et al., 1987)."




(4) Greater happiness


Religion and Happiness

by Michael E. Nielsen, PhD


Many people expect religion to bring them happiness. Does this actually seem to be the case? Are religious people happier than nonreligious people? And if so, why might this be?

Researchers have been intrigued by such questions. Most studies have simply asked people how happy they are, although studies also may use scales that try to measure happiness more subtly than that. In general, researchers who have a large sample of people in their study tend to limit their measurement of happiness to just one or two questions, and researchers who have fewer numbers of people use several items or scales to measure happiness.

What do they find? In a nutshell, they find that people who are involved in religion also report greater levels of happiness than do those who are not religious. For example, one study involved over 160,000 people in Europe. Among weekly churchgoers, 85% reported being "very satisfied" with life, but this number reduced to 77% among those who never went to church (Inglehart, 1990). This kind of pattern is typical -- religious involvement is associated with modest increases in happiness



Argyle, M., and Hills, P. (2000). Religious experiences and their relations with happiness and personality. The International Journal for the Psychology of Religion, 10, 157-172.

Inglehart, R. (1990). Culture shift in advanced industrial society. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.