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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 23, 2023

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There has always been an air of mystery around closed or initiatory traditions. In the modern day, we know very little about what went on in ancient Greek mystery cults like the Eleusinian mysteries.

And yet, today, if I want to know everything there is to know about the Freemason's, Scientology, or Gardnerian Wicca, I'm a few short internet searches away from it. The mantras of Transcendental Meditation, which normally set a practitioner back ~$1000, can be found on various websites, and the basic technique has been distilled and shared as Benson's Relaxation Response and free apps like 1GiantMind. There is no mystery about what goes on inside a Mormon temple.

By and large, modernity has melted away any barriers for the curious to find out everything about a tradition.

Traditionally, kaballah wasn't studied until the age of 40 and the vedas are only supposed to be read by people with a guru to directly instruct them. But despite this, I can get a book on kaballah or the vedas on Audible for $12.99.

There used to be gatekeeping around many of these traditions, and many people actually respected it.

The Catholics had the doctrine of apostolic succession, limiting who could legitimately be said to be a priest, and had the ability to excommunicate someone if they didn't like what they were teaching. Within Hinduism there's a tradition of guru parampara or lineage, where the authority of a teaching is based on an unbroken lineage of gurus passing down proper understanding generation after generation.

In traditional Buddhism, the concept of the sangha or community of practitioners is given high importance, and in many Hindu sects there is an emphasis on satsang or spiritual community.

However, liquid modernity has melted all of this gate-keeping away, and though one can find disgruntled traditionalists on /r/Hinduism, or essays like this one complaining about "Protestant Buddhism" in the West, most Western practitioners are either secular or belong to the jury-rigged bricolage that is New Age, without any care about the actual traditions themselves. Sometimes this is justified by writers like the Dalai Lama claiming that he doesn't want readers to become Buddhists, but to become better Christians, Jews, Secular Humanists, etc.

I think a lot of this is a consequence of modern communication technology. In 1979, B.K.S. Iyengar published "Light on Yoga", full of pictures and instruction on yoga, and you suddenly didn't need a guru to learn the Hindu practice of hatha yoga. Today, you can find a thousand white women in yoga pants guiding you through yoga asanas on Youtube. There are yoga classes for pregnant women in Tel Aviv. Pandora's box has been opened, and there's no way to go back to the way things were before.

Harvard divinity scholars Casper ter Kuile and Angie Thurston coined the term "unbundling", to refer to "a mixture of practices from vastly different religious and devotional traditions, and divorced from institutional and doctrinal contexts." In some respects this has been going on for a long time. There is a long history of syncretism leading to things like Greco-Buddhist art or mixes like Santeria, Caodaiism or the Bahai Faith.

That same Harvard divinity scholar Casper ter Kuile also had the idea of applying the Christian devotional reading practice of Lectio Divina to the Harry Potter books, which lead to things like the Stations of the Horcruxes a fandomized version of the Catholic spiritual practice of the Stations of the Cross.

I recently found myself "protestantizing" or "unbundling" Hinduism, and then reflecting on why exactly I was doing that. I've attended a few ISKCON (better known as the "Hare Krishna movement") kirtans in the past few weeks, and have greatly enjoyed the experience of chanting in a group setting - I've gotten similar experiences being in a mosh pit at a rock concert, or doing a tourist-y full moon ceremony in Bali, but this seemed like something free and accessible on a week-to-week basis that filled a lot of the same niche. But I also started reading the ISKCON books I was picking up in the temple, and was left cold. I was in high school when New Atheism started getting big in the early 2000's, and it definitely shapes a lot of my thinking. I'm not a very "spiritual" person, and have never really been a seeker. (I was in Bali not as an aspiring yogi, but to do a two week Indonesian language immersion course.)

I don't agree with most of ISKCON's beliefs. I don't believe in God, and certainly don't believe that Krishna is anything more than a literary figure. I don't believe in any kind of afterlife, let alone reincarnation. ISKCON's strange mix of monolatry/henotheism, and perennialist "chant 'Yahweh' or 'Allah' if you're uncomfortable with 'Krishna'" approach has always seemed a little silly to me, and their socially conservative rules surrounding sexuality and substance use are a bad fit for my own more liberal/libertarian impulses.

But I believe that is the crux of the problem. After getting my free vegetarian lunch, I just sat by myself or with my partner and ate it, not talking to any of the other people there. I wasn't there for satsang/community, and I wasn't there to make friends or start becoming a true devotee. I was just there for warm fuzzy feelings, because they had a reliable package for eliciting a psychological state I otherwise have trouble achieving. The Hare Krishna's may be against intoxicating substances, but for a brain like mine they have a powerfully ecstatic intoxicant at the core of their practice, and I wanted to be warmed by it without getting burnt.

In some ways, the Hare Krishna's aren't a closed tradition at all. They welcome all comers and they're practically begging people to read "The Bhagavad Gita As It Is" and their many other books and scripture. But they also have a path that they're hoping people will take, involving two levels of formal initiation, and stricter rules that come with it - including chanting the Hare Krishna mantra 1728 times a day, sexual abstinence outside marriage, sattvic vegetarianism and no taking of intoxicants. Reading through "A Beginner's Guide To Krishna Consciousness", I realized that underneath their "exotic" Eastern exterior, ISKCON has all of the features I dislike in religion.

I got the sense that they're really trying to do the evangelical Christian approach of finding broken people whose lives are in enough of a shambles that they'll take any source of meaning and structure offered to get out of the Hell they've made their life into, whether that be abusive relationships, drugs or disconnection, sloth and ennui. And at a very basic level, I don't need their community or practices to add meaning to my life. I have an active social life, many friends, and a loving partner.

But I still found myself researching if there were any secular forms of kirtan that I could reliably tap into. I think this is the double-edged sword when one can't simply unbundle a sacred practice. Imagine if instead of requiring a formal confirmation, anyone could just partake in Catholic communion. There would probably be a lot of "spiritual" tourists who just want to see what this whole "eating Lord Jesus thing" is about.

I'm definitely a spiritual tourist, even if I'm not a particularly spiritual person. I've tried practicing Roman paganism, even though I believe none of it. I've tried praying the rosary, even though I was raised Protestant. I made "pilgrimages" to Catholic spiritual sites within the last year. It's not exactly like there's a god-shaped hole in me, but I see spirituality as an experience that many people have that is completely lacking in my own life, and I'm curious to experience it. I've never felt connected to God, never really felt connected to prayer, never felt like God was trying to tell me something or had a plan for me. It's superficial, but I've sometimes envied devout Christians the way I envy superfans on Tumblr. Like, sure there's a lot of weird restrictions their devotion creates, but I wish I cared as much about God or Star Wars as these people seem to.

I'm an eternal dilettante in the realm of religion and spirituality, and I suspect that much of what is occurring with me is characteristic of other "unbundlers" or what Tara Isabella Burton calls the "spiritually remixed." When you grow up in an atmosphere where all the information about a practice is freely available, when many of the practices have already slowly secularized and been unbundled from religion, it is very easy to become a tourist going here and there, and never matching the achievements of a true pilgrim who sets out for a specific destination and knows where they're going.

ONION-PEELINGS

The Universe is the Practical Joke of the General at the Expense of the Particular, quoth FRATER PERDURABO, and laughed.

But those disciples nearest to him wept, seeing the Universal Sorrow.

Those next to them laughed, seeing the Universal Joke.

Below these certain disciples wept.

Then certain laughed.

Others next wept.

Others next laughed.

Next others wept.

Next others laughed.

Last came those that wept because they could not see the Joke, and those that laughed lest they should be thought not to see the Joke, and thought it safe to act like FRATER PERDURABO.

But though FRATER PERDURABO laughed openly, He also at the same time wept secretly; and in Himself He neither laughed nor wept.

Nor did He mean what He said.

I highly recommend Aleister Crowley and Kabbalah. Crowley was very much a tourist and secular. But there really isn't a community aspect to it anymore. The Thelmites are just lost tourists.

I'm nearly 50 now and I only incorporated kabbalah/crowley/mysticism in my life seriously from 14yo to 19yo. At no point was it nessasary to believe in anything unscientific or irrational. In fact I found it promoted rational thinking.

No reason a spiritual journey can't be rational. And given that we are irrational creatures it is only rational to use our consequentialist programming to do what we will. Magick is just hacking your own brain.

And yet, today, if I want to know everything there is to know about the Freemason's, Scientology, or Gardnerian Wicca, I'm a few short internet searches away from it. The mantras of Transcendental Meditation, which normally set a practitioner back ~$1000, can be found on various websites, and the basic technique has been distilled and shared as Benson's Relaxation Response and free apps like 1GiantMind. There is no mystery about what goes on inside a Mormon temple.

By and large, modernity has melted away any barriers for the curious to find out everything about a tradition.

Interesting post. Not the main thrust, but the first groups that sprang to mind when thinking of traditions that have genuinely retained this secrecy are the Alawites and Druze of the Levant. For those who aren't familiar, the Alawites and Druze are kind of off shoot semi-Islamic sects in Syria/Lebanon/Israel, that have some overlap with Islam but also differ significantly. As far as I am aware many of their beliefs remain secret (presumably to retain the pretence that they are an offshoot of Ismailism?) although most Druze say that they aren't Islamic. I think the Alawites do insist that they are however.

Interested if anyone has any other examples, or for that matter, knows much about the Druze and the Alawites (and their secret practices). Are there theories that Alawites are crypto-Druze for example?

Interesting.

I first learned about ISKCON in undergraduate. I was taking a a comparative religion class, and the day's lecture brushed on them. I can't remember the exact context, but by purest coincidence, I ran into a devotee on campus shortly afterward. After a brief chat, he tried to offer/sell me a copy of the literature, and I realized two things.

First, that this group was optimized for outreach. The man had a script, a backup script should that be politely shut down, and material and social support. All in the service of getting money or time attracted to the regional temple.

Second, that this had to be one of the main reasons for "no soliciting" or "no printed materials" signs. I haven't been able to confirm this suspicion; maybe those signs were spawned to deal with carpetbaggers or encyclopedia salesmen. But ISKCON clearly found an ecological niche. It will send members wherever they may go, spread the word of Lord Vishnu, and perhaps pick up some new adherents.

This is memetic r-selection. Also known as "you miss 100% of the shots you don't take." Not to imply that it is disingenuous--rather, one of the main features that keeps religion afloat is having universalizing beliefs.

I think this goes back to the printing press, not modern communications. Protestant sects blossomed by similar means long before the photocopier or the combustion engine. I don't know enough to say whether that spread was top-down, driven by elite status games, or bottom-up. But I'd be willing to believe the absurd prosperity of the postwar West led to ever greater exposure to foreign information.

"no soliciting" or "no printed materials" signs

I've read that they constantly proselytize at airports. Leading to modern airports strictly forbidding soliciting on or near them.

Hence the numerous jokes about them in Airplane!, which fortunately are now anachronistic:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=iijPvIiDbL0

See also the running gag about Hare Krishna in the Muppet Movie.

I can never shake the feeling when reading stories like this that the person in question is in fact a hardcore devotee of the religion of empiricism or humanism with all the implicit metaphysical positions that come with that relief, gazing longing at other religious traditions but too rock-solid in his own faith to ever forsake the Enlightenment pantheon. I kind of get it, as a Catholic I look at the beauty and solemnity of the Orthodox faith, the strong communities of the Evangelicals, the relative seriousness with which some Jews and Muslims incorporate God into their lives, and I am envious and wish that I could partake in those communities. But my reason and faith lead me to Catholicism and no matter my issues with the Church I can't will myself to disbelieve in what seems to me to be the Truth.

One can easily, rationally and empirically explain spirituality but not so easily replace it. On the other hand if one mistakes dogma with spirituality or either with objective truth (as opposed to useful truths) one has made an error of sever consequence.

I can never shake the feeling

How hard have you tried, honestly?

If you can't shake something off, perhaps you don't really want to let it go.

All I can tell you is that I don't feel a God-shaped hole.

The stars wheel with no sign of a Creator's hand. Men kill and die and are lost to us--as far as I can tell forever. Beauty emerges from the interplay of a thousand million butterflies seething beyond our perceptions. So does suffering. I don't see all that you see.

The question, then, is whether the converse is true. Am I making conclusions based on the whole picture, or do I build on faith and call it reason?

I'm quite religious, and I don't feel a God-shaped hole either. For me it comes down to reason, faith, and personal experiences.

In particular, the single thing which most strongly leads me towards God is science (lowercase s). I have often in life come to a crossroads where I've essentially predicted "If God is real and I have a good understanding of who he is, I should do X. Otherwise, I should do Y." At times I've chosen X, at times I've chosen Y, and I'm personally satisfied enough with the design and outcome of those tests to be reasonably confident in my religious beliefs.

Of course, there's a chance that X is just a proxy for "what my gut says is the right decision" and Y is a proxy for the opposite, but I've tried to be quite thorough and rigorous with these tests, and after a certain point it's impossible to remove any possibility of bias. Sometimes my gut rebels against doing X and tells me that surely it won't work, but I do it anyways and it works out better than I could have imagined.

I'll give you the best recent example I can think of. LDS congregations are called "wards" and groups of congregations are called "stakes". Recently my (quite remote) ward was broadcasting stake conference. There were 3 2-hour sessions to be broadcast, including 2 which would contain highly-anticipated talks (sermons) from a church higher-up. Unfortunately, the broadcast wasn't working. So the wonderful members of my ward sat through 5 hours of screechy whines, the words of the talks only very rarely intelligible at all, and even then only for a second or two at a time. At this point there's only an hour left, everyone looks quite grumpy as they sit and bask in the sound of unholy microphone screeching, and I feel impressed to suggest that we pray for the sound quality to improve. This was very difficult--I was shy, I didn't know many people in the ward, wasn't a leader in any way, and really "calling for a prayer" is something I have never seen done except in occasional emergencies. I very much didn't want to do so, but strongly felt impressed to, and essentially also felt like "if my faith is correct, then of course this is the correct course of action. Therefore I should test it rather than living in uncertainty."

So, the congregation thankfully went along with the suggestion, and the static immediately cleared up completely.

Now, of course this example proves nothing on its own, but when these (and other) sorts of things happen over and over, I (with great reluctance) feel intellectually obligated to accept the gospel as the truth.

Sorry for the sermon, I just want to make clear that my faith has (so far as I can tell, and I've worked very hard to try and figure this out honestly) nothing to do with any disposition towards or need for religion. From my perspective it looks like God patiently gives me opportunity after opportunity to test his claims, because he wants me to follow his advice, and without thorough testing I could never feel sufficiently confident of his existence to make the sacrifices his advice demands.

In my own anecdotal experience, anyone who claims to have been provided an opportunity to test Gods claims, coincidentally never is able to provide a surefire test that can not be attributed to coincidence and/or confirmation bias.

If you prayed right now to find a $100 bill in your mailbox in the morning, and it did not come true it would likely not move you even a single step in the other direction, correct? If you prayed and it did happen then that would of course increase your confidence in your beliefs. How do you know you are truly updating based on the design and outcome of these tests, and not instead just updating when the results match your desired result?

Would you believe any less if when your group prayed for improved sound quality, nothing happened? Or would it be dismissed with a sentiment similar to "God answers all prayers, and sometimes the answer is just no"?

In my own anecdotal experience, anyone who claims to have been provided an opportunity to test Gods claims, coincidentally never is able to provide a surefire test that can not be attributed to coincidence and/or confirmation bias.

Well, you've caught me, because I can't provide a surefire test either. To be fair though I'm one of those guys in the "you can't ever be 100% sure" camps so I don't know if that sort of test is even theoretically possible.

The tests which I've found most consistently produce results are tests related to sin and sacrifice, which is where faith comes in. If you have the faith to test God and give up a sin, even for a short period of time, good results will generally find their way to you in a way somewhat unlikely to be the result of chance. Better results the bigger the sacrifice.

If you prayed right now to find a $100 bill in your mailbox in the morning, and it did not come true it would likely not move you even a single step in the other direction, correct?

If I thought that that was how God worked then it would move me in the other direction. Since I think it's highly unlikely that he works that way, but still more likely than randomly receiving $100, it happening would still move me towards the "God exists" side and it not happening would move me very slightly away, but it's a bad test that I wouldn't try due to the weak signal (among other reasons).

Would you believe any less if when your group prayed for improved sound quality, nothing happened? Or would it be dismissed with a sentiment similar to "God answers all prayers, and sometimes the answer is just no"?

Yes to both. My faith would definitely be a lot weaker if not for that and similar things happening. I can point to 3-4 instances in my life much more significant than the example I shared (both in terms of experimental design, and in terms of how strong the resulting signal was) without which my faith would probably be nonexistent by now. Probably another 3-4 examples at the same level as what I shared too, but which I can actually talk about.

As for why I don't think these are mutually exclusive, I think this is just naturally how updating works if you're doing it right. If I'm learning about some ridiculous conspiracy theory, and learn some half-plausible evidence for it, then perhaps I will lend the conspiracy theory a bit more credence, but at the same time, since I still don't believe in it, I will create a justification/explanation for why that evidence exists besides the conspiracy theory being true.

I absolutely think confirmation bias is still a possibility, and all I can say is that I do my best to stay conscious of that.

Thank you for the thoughtful responses.

You say that you don't believe "God works that way" in regards to the $100 in the mailbox, which is a sentiment I understand as most people of faith would say the same I think. Can you help me understand why $100 in the mailbox is not the way God works but improving sound quality upon request is?

I understand that there are many examples in your life outside of the ones you have given, but are any of them repeatable in a way that you could re-perform the test and have the results consistently be the same? I think I know the answer to that, but it just seems to me like if praying for improved sound quality and it happening is reason for increasing belief then there are a multitude of things you could pray for daily of a similar nature, and record the results/update accordingly. I am sure there is some reason why that is not true as I am aware of the general aversion to testing god in most faiths, but you seem more open to the idea.

Incoming wall of text, I'm sorry, I didn't want it to be this way

You say that you don't believe "God works that way" in regards to the $100 in the mailbox, which is a sentiment I understand as most people of faith would say the same I think. Can you help me understand why $100 in the mailbox is not the way God works but improving sound quality upon request is?

Let me start with a couple of first principles which strike me as intuitively true. I don't mean for this to be persuasive per se so much as to build a foundation to explain my beliefs about God.

  1. God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent, and wants us to be like him

  2. Being like him means being happy, good, and free

  3. It's impossible to force people to be good while preserving their freedom1 (which, yes, means God is not "omnipotent" according to some definitions of the word).

Essentially what I'm trying to explain here is God's motives and why he doesn't just answer every single prayer or personally appear to each person on Earth. The point of us being here is to learn to be good. God wants to reward us for being good, but he wants us to be good for its own sake, not for the reward.

There's a lot more details I'm glossing over, but in short, God putting $100 in the mailbox in response to a simple prayer doesn't match my understanding of who God is and what his motives are. I don't really see how something like that would help anyone to be a better person. The sound quality thing--I wasn't sure if it would actually work, and I'm still not sure if it's something that would always work in similar circumstances, but it at least matches my understanding of who God is and the kinds of behavior he will reward.

I understand that there are many examples in your life outside of the ones you have given, but are any of them repeatable in a way that you could re-perform the test and have the results consistently be the same? I think I know the answer to that, but it just seems to me like if praying for improved sound quality and it happening is reason for increasing belief then there are a multitude of things you could pray for daily of a similar nature, and record the results/update accordingly.

This is where the principle of faith comes in, which here I'll define as "the willingness to test God in what is, to you, a small way given your current experiences." When I was a kid and had seen a few tiny little miracles2, and told of very large ones3 by my parents, I at least had a high enough estimate that God was real4 to do something little like take a few minutes to say a prayer. I was extremely stubborn and refused to consider any of the responses I got through prayer as divine messages--they were generally just simple, good feelings. Soon afterwards the responses became thoughts rather than feelings though, and generally extremely useful thoughts which answered my prayers.

I realize (and realized at the time) that this is terrible evidence. The point is less "those thoughts and feelings proved that God is real" and more "I did a small act of faith and was rewarded in a small way." Given the quality of spiritual guidance I was receiving as I prayed, I considered it a worthwhile occasional pastime even if it really was just some sort of altered mental state where I was more likely to figure out the correct answers to my questions.

So at that point, now that praying more-or-less consistently works for me (if only weakly), it's no longer a test, just something I have found that works. I'm not even close to being willing to accept that God is real, but my estimate of the probability that he is real has risen enough that I'm willing to test something somewhat more substantial, a test which would have seemed crazy for me if not for the weak evidence I had gathered through prayer. For me, that was scripture reading, a task which required somewhat more effort, had somewhat more results (it was a fairly enlightening activity), but still comes nowhere near convincing me that God is real.

This process continued for years. It wasn't all forward progress either. There were plenty of times I would get lazy and stop testing the boundaries, which would soon result in me forgetting evidences I had previously seen (or distrusting my own past self's ability to accurately interpret those evidences) and then backsliding until simple things like reading the scriptures were fairly large acts of faith with equivalent rewards.

Years later, after seeing some much cooler (but still ultimately dismissible) miracles, I was essentially forced to make a choice and test God in a way much greater than I ever had before. I prayed for strength, threw my life in his hands for this enormous test, and it turned out better than I could possibly have imagined. That's an experience I can never deny, so these days I find myself doubting the church much much less, because of the colossal obstacle placed in the way of my skepticism. Unfortunately this obstacle doesn't help much against my many other faults such as laziness and selfishness. Which, again, is my whole point--evidence of God on its own doesn't usually help us to become better people.

I actually did keep a prayer journal5 for a while, but I worried that the very act of keeping the journal was tampering with the results. In my head, I reasoned that if you pray for something and then look for the result, you will probably end up finding something that you interpret as the answer to your prayer, even if it's quite a stretch. I wish I had continued the journal, because now it seems to me that there are relatively easy ways around that, mostly involving time constraints. If something has been plaguing you for months, you pray for it to be solved, and the next day a good solution presents itself, I consider that pretty good evidence for prayer. The longer the solution takes, the worse evidence it is. I like this method because so many of my biggest prayers were answered seconds after they ended, in quite blatant ways.

So to finally answer your question, I think only some of these specific tests are repeatable, but the general principle of faith is fairly straightforward and consistently repeatable, provided your understanding of it is correct. Just take the next step, one you should already know is a good idea based on past experience, and it will lead to positive results, usually both tangible and in the form of a spiritual confirmation. This next step won't instantly confirm that God is real, but it will provide enough evidence to continue forward with a repeat of that test or a larger test, and that process can pretty much continue indefinitely.

Footnotes

  1. Also I think it's fundamentally incoherent to force someone to be good at all. IMO moral goodness fundamentally requires deliberate choice. A murderer who accidentally shoots a dictator rather than their intended victim can't exactly claim moral credit for the result. A bank robber whose money is returned by the police isn't good for returning the money.

  2. Which here I'll define as "things fairly unlikely to have happened without God's intervention", thus marginally increasing my probability estimate that God is real

  3. I honestly spat upon anyone else's description of a miracle which I hadn't seen with my own eyes. Completely dismissed them as probable lies or confirmation bias. I still do, which is why I feel a bit strange writing this stuff down--it's not the kind of thing that would have convinced me at all. In fact even now if someone else were to write a similar post as my original one, I'd still immediately discount it as coincidence or something. That's probably a sign I'm a bit too skeptical, considering I still think others are liars when they share experiences identical to ones I have personally seen for myself.

  4. Whenever I say something like "If God is real" there's an unspoken addition to that: "...and my understanding of him is sufficiently accurate." My understanding of him is heavily reliant on my church and their doctrines, so really what I'm saying is "if this whole system of beliefs is true".

  5. I didn't keep a scripture journal but had similar results attempting to track the evidence there as well. I noticed that I felt better on days when I read the scriptures, but it was incredibly difficult to tell whether it was due to some spiritual enlightenment, or some confounder--maybe I only read the scriptures on days when I felt good. The days I forced myself to read also turned out pretty well, but again I rationalized it as "maybe the days I have the willpower to force myself to read are the days which will turn out well." It's hard to ever know these things for sure.

The phenomenon you're describing is, in the Rationalist religious texts, called "confirmation bias" I believe. Of course more idealist metaphysics do not have this peculiar tendency to dismiss one's awesome ability to change their perception of reality through noticing synchronicity but I doubt there is much ecumenical gains to be made from pointing out such synchronicities because they can all easily be dismissed.

The magnitude of them doesn't matter either in my experience. People will dismiss getting dubs on 4chan as easily as Mandelbrot fractals. "It's only significant because you noticed it" they'll say, the great irony being that this is the very essence of the effect.

I find art works better. It did for me at least. It's much easier to quell the temptation to use the limited tools of reason when you are channeling pure intuitive feeling. And then you can reflect on what is indubitably a transrational experience.

It means nothing because there is no control group. Replace "prayer" with a drug, and you get a shitty observational study that does not mean anything. I wouldn't take this drug.

That's not much of a response considering that OP doesn't even mention prayer.

He was replying to you. You did mention prayer.

Replace "prayer" with a drug and you have a medicine taken by billions of people throughout the world, all of whom claim to benefit from it, and who on average seem to enjoy benefits such as increased happiness, life satisfaction, and longevity. The clinical studies surrounding this drug seem compelling, but that's not enough for me; I wanted to run some of my own as well. I worry the drug may be a placebo--still perhaps effective but not the truth. That's what my studies are for.

And to be clear, if it was just the one I would not place much faith in it at all. It's the fact that this sort of thing happens consistently that makes it hard to deny.

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Well, I think it's basically fair to dismiss these events as confirmation bias. I do so all the time with others' experiences, even in my own church, because I'm naturally an extreme skeptic. I wouldn't have trusted anything of the sort unless it happened to me, specifically, many times over, so I fully understand when others dismiss it.

I find art easier to dismiss as some sort of essentially mundane biological or cultural response, the same way I dismiss meditation. I fully believe meditative experiences happen (though perhaps not at quite the level people claim) but don't think this signifies anything particularly special about meditation itself. It's more just, "Oh, brains do that if you meditate long enough, cool."

Not to dismiss art entirely. I think that those sorts of spiritual experiences are definitely the best way to come to know God, but I also firmly believe that it's possible (if more difficult) to find him purely through rational methods. Ironically you just have to not let your own atheistic confirmation bias control you entirely, but that's difficult enough on its own, at least in my experience.

I can never shake the feeling when reading stories like this that the person in question is in fact a hardcore devotee of the religion of empiricism or humanism with all the implicit metaphysical positions that come with that relief, gazing longing at other religious traditions but too rock-solid in his own faith to ever forsake the Enlightenment pantheon.

You're probably not far from the truth here. I don't think it's easy to force oneself to believe something, and I think religious conversion is a bit like trying to change your entire culture on purpose. It often involves accepting new hierarchies and power structures, new duties, and you're coming in at the bottom of all of it. There's a surrender involved in religious conversion that I think is easier for people who have nothing else to cling to.

I do identify as a "secular humanist" at times, and I think I do have a fairly solid foundation within that tradition. The problem is, that it's a fairly iconoclastic, aniconic life path. Sure, in theory I can tell stories about Aristotle as a proto-marine biologist, Epicurus as a proto-humanist, and pretend Hypatia really was a martyr for science and reason against Christian dogmatism or something. But it's all DIY. It's all rootless. Athens without Jerusalem does have some pretty things with it - but it's all religious in nature. Without Paganism or Christianity, Athens is a pretty austere mistress.

I can find awe in some sources, like Carl Sagan's Cosmos, which has segments that do bring me to tears, and make me appreciate my place in the universe, but that kind of poetic atheism is still a poor substitute for all of the beauty found in religion. I don't think it's an accident that most of my non-religious friends are spiritual vagrants. Many of them believe in astrology, the Law of Attraction, or some kind of afterlife - things I find ridiculous, but even those things seem to be enough to ground them, and make them feel connected to something bigger than themselves.

I do identify as a "secular humanist" at times, and I think I do have a fairly solid foundation within that tradition. The problem is, that it's a fairly iconoclastic, aniconic life path.

(From the top-level)

It's superficial, but I've sometimes envied devout Christians the way I envy superfans on Tumblr. Like, sure there's a lot of weird restrictions their devotion creates, but I wish I cared as much about God or Star Wars as these people seem to.

I would say that Enlightenmentism does care this much, just about something thats not so concrete. I mean, would a normal person write stuff like this:

I was just there for warm fuzzy feelings, because they had a reliable package for eliciting a psychological state I otherwise have trouble achieving. The Hare Krishna's may be against intoxicating substances, but for a brain like mine they have a powerfully ecstatic intoxicant at the core of their practice, and I wanted to be warmed by it without getting burnt.

No, its really quite a small group that thinks like this. Even starting from the water-supply in the West, this takes years of intentionally reshaping your mind. Unfortunatly it also involves thinking that the shape of mind achieved is standard, unremarkable, characterised mainly by absences, so you dont really appreciate it.

Harvard divinity scholars Casper ter Kuile and Angie Thurston

Stop right there, when the words "Harvard" and "divinity scholars" (or nowadays, even "divinity scholars" alone) are in the same sentence, I know what I'm going to read next. "But isn't it all, when you come to think of it, just one big unified pulsing blob of human ingenuity, pulsing pulsing, throbbing throbbing, and twirling gently ever upwards, twirly twirly?"

Of course these types are syncretists, they don't believe in anything but they like some exotic ornamentation to hang on their walls.

There would probably be a lot of "spiritual" tourists who just want to see what this whole "eating Lord Jesus thing" is about.

That was part of what the entire P.Z. Myers host desecration thing was about, and if you missed out on that, lucky lucky you. If you want to read up on the casus belli and what our friend made out of it, you can probably find it online, but it's too depressing for me because I do have reverence for the Eucharist and do believe that entire transubstantiation thing.

Isn't that a mite uncharitable?

I don't know what syncretic cringe Kuile and Thurston have posted in their other work. But in this quote they're just observing a tendency to treat practices like a buffet. No claims that doing so is right, morally or logically. No smug humanism.

Normally, I'd say claiming someone "doesn't believe in anything" is an inflammatory claim demanding evidence. But I suspect looking for such evidence will 1) raise your blood pressure and 2) devolve into gut judgments about sincerity. I don't think that buys us anything.

I don't think it is. Look at what the divinity student quoted is doing; he's not studying divinity, he's doing Ye Olde Post-Modernist Deconstruction. They're not interested in theology as theology but as something they can mix in with mujerism, BIPOC rights, queering society, all the rest of the band.

Like the OP - he didn't want community so he sat on his own eating the lunch. But you can't get the warm fuzzies without community, and the reason the chanting etc. works is because it's done in community under a shared set of belief and values. Like the other characters in the Little Red Hen story who want the bread without putting in the work, if the Hare Krishna adopted his approach you'd have a bunch of individuals sloping in at different times to aimlessly hum off-tune as each did their own little song. That wouldn't give OP what he wanted and what he visited for in order to get.

I’m saying I don’t think he tipped that hand in his quote. You or I can say “gosh these folks sure are trying to uncouple their cake and eat it too,” and that doesn’t make us postmodernists.

I hate trying to defend this guy, because I looked up his current projects and they’re more or less caricatures of what you‘re talking about. I’m reasonably confident that he does, in fact, want syncretic vibes-based spirituality without religion. But as far as this conversation was going he was making a reasonable observation! There are a bunch of folks into decoupling; he’s one of them!

So I find your diatribe about despising his attitude to be a little out of place. The religious equivalent of Man Always Gets Little Rush Out Of Telling People John Lennon Beat Wife. Thanks, that’s nice, but can we stick to comparing albums?

Your post is very interesting, yet I don't fully understand what you mean. It is true that you can learn almost everything there is to know in theory about any religious rite, but it seems to me the most important part is that you cannot live it without taking part of the spiritual journey. You spoke about the catholic communion : you can partake the catholic communion without being a catholic, at least superficially. The catholic church won't allow it, but it's not as if they were asking for your administrative records during the communion. It is not that hard to queue after everyone else and to do as if you were one of them. However, would you really live the catholic communion experience? It seems to me the most important part of it is the faith, the fact that you believe, up to some point, that you are eating the body of God after he sacrificed himself for you. Without this faith, it is just untasteful bread eating and nothing more. It's not really the same experience.

That is the same thing about the wedding. You can make a fake wedding with a girl you met yesterday but the point of the wedding experience is that you really mean that you want to live with this person. For example it is only a catholic wedding if you swear before your friends and family that you will live with your spouse and love him/her for all of your life, and if you mean it. If you don't you didn't get the experience even if you imitated perfectly every step of the rite. It's not about the secrecy of it, but about your commitment to it.

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It's not so much about the faith ("the structure of beliefs") as about your personal journey and your community. You can have a muslim wedding if you are from a christian background, but you won't live it the same way as someone from a muslim family. His family will know the rite and be a part of it, while yours will be just spectators (if they are comfortable attending at all). At the end that is not the same experience.

The lack of mystery of course isn’t just a religious thing. NYT columnist do not like the fact that they no longer have “special access” to knowledge and now compete with dude with a twitter handle and often lose.

A lot of todays culture wars are the same thing. Elites no longer have special information access able to control the narrative thru vetted media channels like Dick Cheney selling the Iraq War. And no one had the data or reach to challenge him. Fauci is perhaps the most modern high priest who in the past since he sat on a lot of information flows had the priest power of speaking directly to god for his followers. Now everyone knows in real time when he’s just making it up as he goes.

The Hare Krishna (or ISKCON to give them their official name) have the benefit of being an offshoot of a genuine real religious tradition, so there's backing and a foundation to it. It's not like a Western-version of Krishna devotion completely made up by a couple of white guys (or chicks, paging Helena Blavatsky) out of a mish-mash of poorly digested Oriental traditions. Without the source, they would have dried up and blown away entirely if they only had the hippie culture to rest on.

I think an important part of early adoption of the movement was some heavy hitters of pop culture noticing the faith. You had people like John Lennon and George Harrison associating with the Hare Krishnas (with the latter even paying for their London temple to be made), and they even had ISKCON-related songs like "My Sweet Lord" that made it onto the pop charts.

I think it's actually a bit of a sad thing to read through some of ISKCON's material. There's so much optimism surrounding their incredible growth in the earlier period of Western transmission in the 60's and 70's, and so many promises that eventually "Hare Krishna" will be on the lips of every person, and then there's the harsh reality that most people have barely heard of them. Maybe some people in big cities have bumped into them handing out books, but I'd dare to say that the Jehovah's Witnesses and Mormons have a much bigger cultural presence in the United States today.

My city's ISKCON temple seems to be about half Indian immigrant families using it as a local Hindu temple, and half Western converts to the faith.