Living with a Wild God

Having spent the last eight months reading and discussing Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell (see previous posts Sept., 2013-April, 2014) in my Unitarian Universalist Adult Religious Education group, it seemed serendipitous when I saw Barbara Ehrenreich interviewed about her new book.

An atheist writing about having had mystical experiences?  What would Dennett say?

Probably he would say what Ehrenreich herself said for years: temporary psychic break, “perceptual slippage,” sudden electrical or chemical power surge in the brain, etc., in any case, a perfectly rational and natural explanation.

Raised by atheist parents under the strong influence of her scientist father, Ehrenreich struggled most of her life with those rational and natural explanations that were never quite commensurate with the experiences themselves, experiences in which the natural boundaries of ordinary physical objects broke down and the world seemed to flame out in radiance.

She pursued a career in science herself, moving from chemistry to physics, finally earning a Ph.D. in Cellular Immunology, before becoming a free-lance writer more focused on the social science of feminism, economic inequality, war, militarism, and the politics of health care than chemistry, physics, or religion.

It was actually her research into the origins of human warfare that eventually intersected with her life-long quest to understand her seemingly “mystical” experiences.  The study of human evolution led her to, lo and behold, the Hyperactive Agency Detection Device or HADD (see previous post Jan., 2013), which Dennett cites to explain the rise of early religion in the form of animism and the human belief in other types of “imaginary agents.” 

For Dennett, this survival mechanism becomes overdeveloped, even as it makes the advancement of the species possible, resulting in supernatural belief and eventually the cultural evolution of organized religion.  By now, however, Ehrenreich’s faith in the certainties of empirical science has been undermined by the New Science of quantum mechanics and “non-linear dynamics.”  And she dares to ask the question:  If the HADD is reliable when it comes to detecting conventionally observable predators, why is it not reliable in detecting other, non-conventionally observable agents? In any case, how do we know that the latter type of agents is entirely imaginary?

In the end, she does not undergo any kind of religious conversion, but her “faith” in atheism has been shaken.  While, she says she does not believe in a god or gods or divinity or universal consciousness at work in the world, she keeps an open mind, neither drawing definite conclusions from her “mystical” experiences nor rejecting them as aberrations without any meaning.  There may just be more going on in the universe than our ordinary powers of human perception can take in, and “it may be seeking us out.”

Metaphysical musings aside, Ehrenreich’s book is also an autobiographical study of family dysfunction, a string of broken relationships, academic experimentation, political and social awakening, and self-exploration, all held together by the author’s lifelong quest for the truth about our inexplicable human “situation.”

She recounts tragedy, disappointment, misdirection, social idealism, political activism, success and failure with a cold, unsparing eye and a sharp wit.  There is no sentimentalism, no high-flown rhetoric, no glamorization, and no air-brushing of stark reality.  Ehrenreich’s unflinching rationalism, skepticism, and wry humor make her openness to the possibility of a “palpable Other or Others,” more credible than the espoused certainties of either true believers or confirmed non-believers.  She is not one to be seduced by easy answers or wishful thinking.   And that ethic applies to herself as well as to her “wild God.”

Breaking the Spell VI

I found chapter 9 to be a fascinating discussion of why people are so attached to their religions as to foreclose any rational investigation of them.

Daniel Dennett cites three reasons:  1) love that is akin to irrational romance, 2) the postmodern academic restriction that only sympathizers are qualified to study religion, and 3) the “belief in belief” discussed earlier (see previous post Feb., 2014).

First, like lovers who eschew any rational questioning of their romantic attachments, many religious adherents appeal to experiences with the divine as beyond words, much less logic.  Just as critically analyzing a love relationship ruins the romance of it, so subjecting the religious experience to empirical study is completely antithetical to the experience itself, which transcends all mundane research.

I admit to a certain amount of sympathy with this line of thought, but when I consider how often irrational romantic attachment and religious enthusiasm can both lead to destructive, even violent, behavior, I welcome any study that helps us better understand these states of mind.  And I would think that romantic lovers and religious believers themselves would want to have some insight into the difference between a healthy and an unhealthy attachment.

Second, since the advent of postmodern identity politics, the whole idea of academic neutrality has been thoroughly interrogated and largely debunked.  A male can’t really study feminism because he is inherently biased in favor of his own gender.  The same applies to whites who attempt to study non-whites or privileged elites who study the poor.  Similarly, non-believers cannot escape their own bias when studying religion and are therefore less credible.  It takes a religious sympathizer who applies academic methods from “inside” the subject matter to arrive at the most reliable understanding.  Of course, women, non-whites, the less privileged, and religious sympathizers can’t escape their own biases either, but at least they speak from first-hand experience.  

Again, I see the value of this point of view, but as a white woman of professional class status I can also see the value of learning about my social situation from a non-white, non-professional male, who may be able to instruct me in how my attitudes and behavior affect him.  Similarly, as a Unitarian Universalist I think I can learn from an outside observer of my religious denomination.  If absolute objectivity is impossible, then surely the most complete understanding comes from both an inside and outside analysis.

Finally, just as Americans who criticize the United States are sometimes told, “America, love it or leave it!” so those who question religion, even from within, perhaps especially from within, are often made to feel like traitors.  The “belief in belief” is so powerful because, just as extreme patriots believe their country would be better if all its citizens displayed unquestioning loyalty, so religious adherents often believe that the world would be a better place if everyone held an unquestioning belief in God. 

This last deterrent to the rational study of religion raises the question of what religion is good for.  Earlier (see previous post Jan., 2014) Dennett had conceded that false belief can yield benefits, such as greater confidence, optimism, and even enhanced physical and mental health.  In this chapter he cites empirical studies to support such ameliorative effects of religion, but he claims the research results are mixed and withholds judgment until more thorough research can be done. 

This certainly seems fair.  At least he does not dismiss the possibility out of hand that religion may be good for people, regardless of its truth value.  Even if the possibility is confirmed, Dennett raises another question, namely what are the side effects of false belief, and do they outweigh the benefits?  More importantly, is religion the basis of morality?  And that question will be addressed in the next chapter.

Breaking the Spell I

My Unitarian Universalist Adult Religious Education group is reading Daniel Dennett’s 2006 study of religion *Breaking the Spell.*  The plan is to discuss small chunks every two weeks or so through next May.  Therefore my plan is to post a series of commentaries, one chunk at a time, allowing for much more depth than most of my blog posts.  This post covers chapter 1, “Breaking Which Spell?” 

Dennett proposes to break the taboo against studying religion scientifically “as a natural phenomenon” even at the risk of breaking the spell, the “enchantment,” of religion itself.   I found it puzzling that he would spend so much time defending this proposal since I was under the impression that historians, social scientists, psychologists, etc., had been studying religion and religious experience long before 2006.  As a student at a Disciples of Christ sponsored college in the late 1960s, I was required to take two semesters of religion.  Both courses were scholarly studies of the Bible based on historical, textual, and linguistic evidence.  Jerry Falwell studied under the same professor as I did, and, according to the professor, he objected strongly and vocally to this approach to Biblical study.  The taboo was apparently real for Falwell (no surprise there), but the professor defended his approach on academic grounds and no students, faculty, or administrators that I knew ever objected.

Having been raised as a Southern Baptist I will confess that my college religion classes did break what little was left of the “spell” that my religious upbringing had cast over me.  That spell, however, had already been put in question by high school biology (we studied evolution) and my own rational thinking.  Ironically, it was my formal and informal study of literature, poetry, metaphor, symbolism, mythology, world religion, philosophy, astronomy, and physics that recast the spell in much more sophisticated, figurative, abstract, and, yes, scientific terms. 

My reading of *The Housewife and the Professor* (see previous post) reminded me of my early fascination with Platonism, which I studied in college philosophy classes and which could be considered a religious world view.

And like many of my friends, who consider themselves “religious” or “spiritual,” I welcome the study of religion and the opportunity to expand my understanding of this aspect of my experience and understanding of the world.  I wonder why Dennett has not been exposed to more of us for whom religion, responsible scholarship, rational thinking, and scientific study are not necessarily at odds.

Related to this question is the second bone I have to pick with Dennett’s first chapter.  Why does he define religion so narrowly?  Here’s his “tentative” definition:  religions are “social systems whose participants avow belief in a supernatural agent or agents whose approval is to be sought.”  I understand the value of distinguishing between organized religion (“social systems”) and private religious or “spiritual” experience or belief.  But why must religion be limited to belief in a “supernatural agent  or agents whose approval is to be sought”?  Dennett seems to restrict religion to belief in an anthropomorphic “god” or “gods” with the power to pass judgment on us.  He seems to take the anthropomorphic language of traditional religion literally, without allowing for the capacity of believers to use the language metaphorically.

In other words, he seems to propose to subject fundamentalist, literalistic religious belief (such as that of Jerry Falwell) to an exhaustive scientific study but not the kind of religion that itself takes into account science and rationality or the kind that resists claims of certainty but simply maintains a mindset that is open to exploring the possibility of a supernatural reality (not necessarily a being or “agent”) or dimension in the universe. 

Finally, by Dennett’s definition, my own religious denomination of Unitarian Universalism, though it qualifies as a social system, would not meet his definition, and would therefore be considered a form of religious fraud, illegitimately taking advantage of the 501c3 tax exemption for religious organizations. 

I wonder if his “tentative” definition will undergo any loosening or broadening as his study continues to unfold.

Memory's Gate

The author of this 1989 novel, Greg Erickson, is a fellow congregant of mine at St. Cloud Unitarian Universalist Fellowship (http://www.uufstcloud.org/).  I’m looking forward to talking to him about it, but this blog post is being written with no input from him.  I’m hoping he’ll leave a comment, so my readers can see what he thinks of my reading of his book.

One thing I want to ask him is how he got the idea for the book.  He takes the religious idea of reincarnation and the romantic idea of a “soul mate,” combines them, literalizes them, and puts them into a realistic setting.  What if you could identify someone who shared your soul in a past life?  What if you could identify the person who, in this life, shares the soul of your previous identity’s soul mate?   That is what happens in Memory’s Gate.  It is almost enough to make you believe in reincarnation.  Well, maybe not, but it will definitely make you believe in imagination.  And Greg Erickson has plenty of that!

He also has the skill to construct a narrative that moves back and forth in time from the the life of Paul Weeres in the present day to his past life in the form of Michael McSwain in the 19^th century, not to mention the flashbacks during Weeres’ life.  The flashback is certainly an appropriate device to use for an exploration of past lives; however, all this time travel requires readers’ full attention lest they mix up, not only the time sequence in Weeres’ life, but also what happens to whom in both lives, especially since the two lives have several parallels.

Weeres goes along with a hypnotist at a dinner party, who, apparently by accident, regresses him to his past life as Michael McSwain.  Later, automatic writing appears on one of Weeres’ antique typewriters, eventually leading him to the elaborate scheme concocted by McSwain to contact, not only his soul in the next life, but also that of his first wife and soul mate.  The whole narrative is quite ingenious.

In addition to McSwain’s quest to contact the future and Weeres’ journey to understand reincarnation and contact the past, there is Weeres’ romantic quest for his soul mate, which is mostly a waiting game as he cycles through a wife and several lovers, both real and potential.

Erickson’s genius is to make all this reasonably credible.  According to reincarnation theory, nothing is a coincidence.  Even so, it was a bit of a stretch for me that the soul of McSwain’s second wife ends up in the body of his great-granddaughter, who becomes Weeres’ lover.  There’s also a pretty bizarre episode in which McSwain’s former housekeeper goes off the deep end and tries to murder his second wife in a knife attack.  For the most part, though, Erickson keeps the narrative on a pretty realistic and believable plane.

Nevertheless, there’s a gothic quality as the supernatural (and the violence) intersect with everyday reality.  Yet, the style evokes more curiosity and suspense than fear, and the protagonists emerge, not only relatively unscathed, but fulfilled. However gothic, the narrative does not play out in terms of mere escape from the irrational, but in terms of domestication of the irrational.  The seemingly irrational notion of reincarnation is tamed and incorporated into the realm of ordinary reality.

Similarly, if you accept the rational reality of reincarnation, then the romantic idea of a soul mate is perfectly sensible.  The only question is whether the two souls will find each other.  A lot depends on the suspension of disbelief.

What I found most fascinating, though, is the way reincarnation can stand in for the somewhat unorthodox religion that Erickson and I share, Unitarian Universalism.  I have no idea if it was intentional, but, knowing Greg, when I read of the suspicion, especially in the 19^th century setting, with which reincarnation was viewed, I could not help but think of how Unitarian Universalism today is often viewed as a questionable, fringy, if not cultish, belief system. 

Weeres, to some extent, but especially McSwain, must keep his belief in reincarnation secret, McSwain from 19^th century conservative Christians and Weeres from 20^th century rational skeptics.  Similarly, Unitarian Universalism is often viewed, at best, as a weird religion, and, at worst, as a form of devil worship.  When one considers that reincarnation would be viewed, at best, with skepticism, and, at worst, with contempt by most Unitarian Universalists today, the historical parallels and ironies compound.

One way to read this novel is simply as imaginative play.  And that’s enough right there.  It’s a fun read.  But you could also find, if you are so inclined, a message about enduring truths of human experience, truths about the quest for identity and lasting love, for example.  But there’s also a message about how social conformity and environmental pressures control our belief systems, and the tremendous effort it requires to resist those forces and pursue our own truth. 

I can’t wait to ask Greg what he thought he was doing in this novel!