Naturalistic Paganism
The HPedia: Selfishness argument
Your help is needed! Please critique this entry from the HPedia: An encyclopedia of key concepts in Naturalistic Paganism. Please leave your constructive criticism in the comments below.
This is a proposed label for a common objection leveled against naturalistic ritual by some hard theists. It criticizes naturalists for being “only in it for themselves”, “only concerned with what they get out of it”, etc.
To understand the argument, one must see it from a hard theistic point of view: deities being real, ritual is primarily for deities. Focusing only on the benefits for oneself neglects the other.
The force of the argument relies on shaming the target for what is implied as selfish behavior.
Outside a hard theistic point of view, the argument quickly falls apart: if deities are not real (in the sense that hard theists mean them to be real), then there is no other to neglect.
However, even from a hard theistic point of view, the argument does not hold up: just because the divine is (supposedly) neglected does not mean ritual can only be for the selfish interests of the individual. Ritual often effects social benefits by bonding groups together and orienting individuals toward enhanced social cooperation. Further, it often motivates the individual to action toward environmental, humanitarian, or community goals. Finally, it often develops the moral character of the individual toward increased empathy, compassion, humility, love, and other prosocial traits. None of these effects can rightly be characterized as selfish, as they all extend benefit well beyond his or her narrow self interest.
For more on this issue, see the article Why do ritual as a Naturalistic Pagan?
Check out other entries in our HPedia.
Why is the ancient history of naturalism important to our future?
The truth is not ours to choose, but to discover.
– by B. T. Newberg
Does it matter whether naturalism is ancient or modern? What difference does it make as we march toward the future?
The importance of naturalism’s history may not be immediately obvious. After all, it’s what we do now that’s most important, right? Yet the past holds the keys to our future. There are at least three essential reasons why knowing naturalism’s ancient history is critical to moving forward.
This post is a follow-up to a previous post entitled Naturalism in prehistory?. Read More
The HPedia: Mental illness argument
Your help is needed! Please critique this entry from the HPedia: An encyclopedia of key concepts in Naturalistic Paganism. Please leave your constructive criticism in the comments below.
The “mental illness argument” is a proposed label for a dismissive strategy often employed against the religious. The technique is simple: one finds some point of similarity between a religious behavior and a known mental illness, and proceeds to dismiss the religious behavior in its entirety. This is a plain logical fallacy involving an over-generalization of similarity. It seems structurally similar to the reductio ad Hitlerum: “comparing an opponent or their argument to Hitler or Nazism in an attempt to associate a position with one that is universally reviled.”
A response based on neuroscience is put forward by Whittle:
His [Patrick McNamara’s] book, The Neuroscience of Religious Experience, contains an exhaustive survey of the neurological research done in the field. In it, he describes three areas of investigation that have illuminated our understanding of the particular role that religious experience plays in the development of self: Neurological disorders and brain injuries; the operation of chemical agents on the brain; the neurology of religious experiences in healthy persons.
There is a remarkable consistency in all three areas of research. Persons suffering from temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE), schizophrenia, schizotypy, and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) among other disorders experience a pronounced heightening of religiousness. Successful treatment for these disorders corresponds to a reduction in religiosity. The areas of the brain involved in these disorders represents a circuit of interacting nodes:
I believe that when taken together the clinical data suggest that the limbic system (particularly the amygdala), portions of the basal ganglia, the right temporal lobe (particularly the anterior portion of the medial and superior temporal lobe), and the dorsomedial, orbitofrontal, and right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex are the crucial nodes in a brain circuit that mediates religiosity. [The] circuit, in turn, is regulated by the mesocortical dopamine (DA) and various serotoninergic systems.
When this circuit is stimulated in the right way, you get religious ecstasy. When the circuit is overactivated, you get various forms of religiously tinged aberrations. When cortical sites (right temporal and frontal) play the leading role, you get ideational changes in belief systems and outright delusional states. When limbic and basal ganglia sites play the leading role, you get changes in ritual behaviors as well as increased interest in religious practices such as prayer and other rituals.
And what about healthy persons performing religious acts — prayer and glossolalia, meditation, reading the Psalms? Quite remarkably, the very same circuit of nodes are at play among the wide spectrum of religious activity and people. Rather than an indicator of mental disease, the data suggest that religious experiences represent something quite the opposite: they are part and parcel an aspect of ordinary human brain function. Neurological disorders experiencing extreme or dysfunctional religiosity appear to be malfunctioning nodes and/or interactions within the otherwise normal human circuit for religion.
Check out other entries in our HPedia.
Emotional Pantheism: Where the logic ends and the feelings start, by Áine Órga
Logically, I am an atheist. Emotionally, I am a pantheist.
I am the kind of person who does not really believe in anything unless it can be empirically proven in some way. I do have a lot of scope for entertaining theoretical constructs that can be logically laid out – I have an imaginative analytical brain, and I love to theorise and philosophise. And certainly, not everything that is even self-evident can be properly accounted for empirically. The universe as we know it and experience it is not by any means fully understood. But although there are theological and philosophical theories and intangible concepts that excite me and are meaningful to me, I’m not sure that I could be said to believe in divinity in any real way.
But when it comes to how I resonate emotionally, I have very strong pantheistic feelings. Although I may not see divinity as something that can even be defined, let alone proven, I feel as though the universe is divine. It is not something I believe in the way that I believe in science and physics and the physicality of my day-to-day existence. But it is something that I feel at my very core. It is an emotional response to awe, to beauty, to mystery. And that emotional response is very strong in me. Read More
The HPedia: Hubris
Your help is needed! Please critique this entry from the HPedia: An encyclopedia of key concepts in Naturalistic Paganism. Please leave your constructive criticism in the comments below.
The term hubris indicates over-reaching. Modern usage points to overweaning pride or arrogance, often with a corresponding blindness to one’s own limitations:
excessive pride or self-confidence (Oxford Dictionaries Online)
The word comes from the ancient Greek term for irreverent, outrageous treatment:
In ancient Greek, hubris (Ancient Greek ὕβρις) referred to actions that shamed and humiliated the victim for the pleasure or gratification of the abuser. … The word was also used to describe actions of those who challenged the gods or their laws, especially in Greek tragedy, resulting in the protagonist’s fall. (Wikipedia)
Note that ancient usage does not specify pride or arrogance, but refers rather to humiliating another for one’s own pleasure.
In a modern scientific context, hubris might take the form of drawing conclusions beyond what is warranted by the evidence, or taking provisional conclusions as true in an absolute sense. This kind of hubris aligns with what is often called scientism (see “Scientism”). Another form might be ignorance or dismissal of one’s own biases in perception. Yet another form might be treating those with whom we disagree with disrespect or contempt.
No less a scientist than James Lovelock, who recently admitted some of his more dire climate change predictions were “alarmist”, exemplifies the kind of scientific integrity that avoids hubris. He tells The Guardian:
One thing being a scientist has taught me is that you can never be certain about anything. You never know the truth. You can only approach it and hope you get a bit nearer to it each time. You iterate towards the truth. You don’t know it.
In contrast to hubris, we can adopt what DT Strain calls a “humble approach to knowledge.” He considers this among the top ten signs of good spirituality:
A good spirituality will engender humility in the practitioner when it comes to beliefs. It will produce a practitioner that is careful about making claims that cannot be substantiated. The practitioner will appreciate their limitations as a human being, not assuming they have more ability to ‘know’ things than they do. They would learn to be comfortable with a state of ‘not knowing’ all things. Such an approach will guide the practitioner in their own assumptions, as well as in accepting the claims of others without good reason. A good spiritual path will encourage doubt, asking questions, etc. It will not encourage the practitioner to accept claims on the basis of authority, or tradition, or faith, or any other means than good sense and self experience. But at the same time, this principle will not be one that encourages the practitioner to spend their time telling others what they should or shouldn’t believe. Rather, its focus will be on helping the practitioner in their own walk.
Another way to approach the matter would be mindfulness not only of science’s power to explain things, but also to unexplain them, i.e. to reveal how much we do not (yet) know.
M. Jay Lee describes hubris:
Hubris is committed when one fails to remember the limitations of being human. We humans will never have perfect knowledge, nor can we ever be completely sure that our judgments are not clouded by our own, often unconscious, desires and needs. Hubris is often associated with violent and extreme actions. One doesn’t need a crystal ball to know that when humans become arrogant and start acting as if they were gods that things will end badly. In the poetic convention of mythology, it is often one god or another who is portrayed as punishing hubris, but in my opinion it is really just the way of life itself, in the end life catches up. No one can be lucky all the time. To set oneself up too highly, is to set oneself up for a great fall.
See also “Scientism.”
Check out other entries in our HPedia.
Buy Godless Paganism (paperback)
Buy Godless Paganism (ebook)
Pagan Coming Out Day – May 2nd
Naturalistic Paganism 