Naturalistic Paganism
The HPedia: Mental illness argument
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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.
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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
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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.”
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Meaning and truth, by Treeshrew
Life is all about balancing these two: truth and meaning
I just came across this brilliant post from one of my favourite online druid writers, John Beckett, who writes at Under the Ancient Oaks. Check his blog out if you haven’t already!
I think it is so important that we, as druids, as naturalists or even just as people, live lives of both truth and meaning. John defines truth as ‘that which is’ and meaning as ‘that which makes life worth living’, which is one of the simplest and best definitions I have ever seen. In my experience, it is all too easy to lose the balance between the two and ignore one or the other. So many religious people seem to emphasise their particular faith’s form of meaning at the expense of truth, and end up believing in absurdities like creationism as a result. On the other side of the coin, some atheists emphasise pure, rational truth at the expense of inner meaning.
For me, life is all about balancing those two. I find truth in science, reason and evidence. The scientific method is the single best tool we have for finding out what is real and how things work. In my understanding of science, this rules out a lot of religious or magical ideas as impossible. Yet I find meaning in druidry, in spending time in nature, in doing ritual. This is not a contradiction, though there are those on both sides who would say that it is.
The HPedia: Scientism bait-and-switch
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 name for a tactic often used to insulate metaphysical, magical, or theological claims against criticism in the context of science. It exploits the real danger of scientism, i.e. extending the authority of science beyond the evidence, to advance an extraordinary claim.
Its form is simple: first, (1) establish that some things are beyond the scientific method by pointing out that science cannot measure in a laboratory such things as truth or love, then (2) introduce your favored theory (be it a claim of magic, divinity, mystical energy, or what have you) as if all things not measurable by science are now equally believable. Cry “scientism” against any attempt to critique the latter, on the grounds that science cannot critique the former.
This is a classic bait-and-switch that lures the listener in with a claim most anyone would agree with (truth and love are real, though not measurable by science), then switches to a claim much fewer would agree with (magic, divinity, etc., are real, though not measurable by science).
What is particularly pernicious about this tactic is that the extraordinary claim tends to carry with it objective aspects open to scientific investigation (does magical healing have an effect above placebo or not?), but these drop out of sight due to misdirection of attention toward the subjective aspects analogous to love or truth (science can’t measure whether the magical healer perceives the disease in the patient or not!).
One effective strategy to counter this tactic may be to call attention back to the objective aspects of the extraordinary claims.
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