[extropy-chat] Re: John Wright Finds God

[Joseph Bloch]

Forgive me for perhaps speaking out of turn, as I've only recently 
returned to the Extropy email list, but I must wonder why folks are 
coddling this bizzare talk of visits from ghosts, gods, magic nose 
goblins, holy spirits, or what-have-you? Mind you, I don't question Mr. 
Wright's earnestness or his motives; I simply question his credulity.

The mechanisms of hallucination-- even wildly vivid hallucination-- are 
well-known to medical science, and the specific parts of the brain which 
react to religiously-based hallucinations (as well as religiously-based 
experiences which are based on ritual and other human-induced causes) 
are beginning to be identified and even their evolutionary benefits 
identified. I'm sure it felt realer than sunshine to Mr. Wright, but so 
too do the demons that haunt the mind of the schizophrenic seem to him 
or her.  He asks:

 > what does an honest and rational man do when he has a supernatural 
experience?
 >
 > Does he, like Scrooge, claim Marlowe's ghost is a bit of beef, a 
product of bad
 > digestion? Does he accuse himself of hallucination rather than 
entertain the
 > opinion that his axioms might be mistaken? Occam's razor, plus a 
modicum of
 > intellectual integrity, would seem to militate against this assumption.

I take issue with his notion that Occam's razor slices on the side of 
theism (particularly that it comes down on the side of any particular 
branch of theism, such as Christianity, whence seems to have been drawn 
the imagery for his own experience). What, I ask, is the simpler 
solution? That he has experienced a well-known and well-studied 
phenomeon (vivid hallucination with particularly religious connotations) 
in a time of emotional stress (lying in a hospital bed, if I can parse 
his prose properly)? Or that he has been personally visited by a 
supernatural entity whose very existence is unnecessary according to the 
accepted scientific cosmology of the day and whose specific exploits 
(according to the Christian scriptures, at any rate) are explicitly 
contrary to what we know to be true in terms of the creation of the 
universe, its constraints, and its age, and who just happens-- by 
sheerest coincidence-- to map perfectly to the predominant religious 
ideation in which he grew up; despite the fact that he did not himself 
accept it, he was still surrounded by 9 out of 10 individuals who did, 
at any given time.

To paraphrase Dickens: "There's more of delusion than deity about it, 
whatever it was!"

He further claims:

 > My faith was visited upon my by the Holy Spirit; it was poured into 
me like fine
 > wine into an empty tin cup. I do not believe reason the proper tool 
to use to
 > decide these matters; nay, I do not believe that they are "decided" 
at all.

Indeed, here we agree. I would say they are "imposed"; we are the 
product of a few hundred thousand years of hominid evolution, which has, 
apparently because religious experience such as your own was 
evolutionarily advantageous, hard-wired some 90+% of us to accept them 
and thereby become more altruistic and/or deferential towards authority. 
Populations with such genes naturally flourished relative to those who 
did not, back before technology became the great leveler. He is a 
product of his evolutionary heritage, even as he seeks to deny it.

And lastly, he attempts to create an analogy to explain his experience, 
finding the example of Flatland lacking:

 > Trying to explain a religious experience is like a Yahoo trying to 
explain his
 > love of the shiny but useless metal called gold to the dignified and
 > perfectly-rational Houyhnhnms. No matter what he says, the Houyhnhnms 
cannot
 > see the value or the beauty of the substance they cannot eat.

I am reminded of the earnest entreaties of those who create tin-foil 
hats to frustrate the plots of the Illuminati. Or those who think that 
we are inhabited by invisible undetectable 'engrams' which are really 
aliens banished by the evil galactic emperor a million years ago. Or 
those who think that every stream and stone and tree harbors an 
invisible spirit. The examples of such earnest foolishness are legion, 
but they boil down to a single fact; we Houyhnhnmns can only allow and 
encourage the Yahoo to starve in their quest for gold, as long as they 
leave us alone to feast on the fruits of the world.

Because, truly, man starves by relying on every word that proceeds from 
the mouth of god alone.

Joseph

Enhance your body "beyond well" and your mind "beyond normal":
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