Everybody Is Wrong About God by James A. Lindsay

Author:James A. Lindsay [Lindsay, James A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw
Tags: Religion & Spirituality, Agnosticism, Psychology, Non-Fiction, Religion, Skepticism, Psychology of Religion, Theology, Atheism
ISBN: 1634310365
Google: rLozrgEACAAJ
Amazon: B016TX3RP6
Barnesnoble: B016TX3RP6
Goodreads: 25362965
Publisher: Pitchstone Publishing
Published: 2015-12-01T00:00:00+00:00

Spiritual Attribution

“Spiritual” is another word that clearly means something—and apparently something important—to many religious people, and almost invariably among them, whatever may be that something, it is typically made sense of in terms of “God.” This is also the case for the legions of people who now identify as “spiritual but not religious,” many of whom still believe in “God” in some capacity. Thus, the difficulty here is not in making a case that “God” is used as an object of attribution for “spiritual” matters but rather in making sense of what constitutes the “spiritual” in the first place. As with everything else in this book, the effort will be to make sense of the term without appealing to anything dualistic.

The “spiritual” experiences people have arise in what some psychologists would call a transpersonal aspect of individual psychology, a term we must unpack considerably. The Wikipedia entry elaborates upon transpersonal psychology in this way:

Issues considered in transpersonal psychology include spiritual self-development, self beyond the ego, peak experiences, mystical experiences, systemic trance, spiritual crises, spiritual evolution, religious conversion, altered states of consciousness, spiritual practices, and other sublime and/or unusually expanded experiences of living.62

Though many nonbelievers will immediately experience a rather violent, wrenching twitch in the central joint of the lower limb at many of the words in that description, transpersonal psychology is clearly distinguished from parapsychology (and other nonsense) and is a field that makes substantive contributions to psychology and psychiatry, particularly in situations where one’s religious or spiritual beliefs have legitimately led to mental illness. Readers who remain skeptical that spirituality is of legitimate worth to human psychology are also strongly encouraged to carefully and thoughtfully read neuroscientist Sam Harris’s Waking Up,63 which attempts to discuss many topics branded “spiritual” without the first hints of the usual kinds of confusions that plague the subject matter.

For the purposes of the goals of this book, however, we need not bother with whether or not nonbelievers accept “spiritual” experiences. Religious believers do, and they almost universally tie these experiences, whatever they are, to the concept they call “God.” They use this term “God” because they need an attribution that explains these aspects of their experience, be those psychological or sociological,64 be they rather mundane or profoundly transcendent. Mystical experiences in religion are a central component of what many seek in some context within their religious beliefs and practices.

Some of these experiences in Christianity are often equated with the Holy Spirit or an alleged sensus divinitatis (sense of the “divine”—something we can now appreciate with significantly less confusion thanks to Haidt’s choice of terminology for the more rarefied aspects of psychosocial valuation). Christians take these ideas very seriously. In fact, they are often taken as direct experiential proof of “God’s” existence, bearing automatic warrant to hold the beliefs fully rationally.65

No doubt a considerable component of this problem is that nearly all of the linguistic architecture in existence for handling the “spiritual” is religious or finds itself within the provinces of pseudo-religious crackpots and quacks.

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