I think there’s something that always seems to get left out of these conversations and that’s that “when I practice my religion, I feel something that I don’t feel otherwise” is frequently a true statement for the religious.
I’ve often heard self-described atheists say that, often when conversing/debating with religious folks about why they believe, the conversation comes to a point where the religious person will say “I’ve just had a personal experience” and the atheist, unable to relate to that, really has no way to advance the conversation beyond that.
Were I opposite some fundamentalist Christian or something in such a situation, my response would be “yeah, me too! That’s totally normal.”
I think the beligerantly nonreligious either can’t relate to religious experiences or don’t want to admit to having had them for fear of embarassment or maybe rhetorical concessions. And the religious typically haven’t had such experiences outside the context of their religious practices, or if they have they still attribute it to their religious beliefs, and so take it as proof of their beliefs.
And these religious experiences are very real and very normal. Probably some people are more prone to such experiences than others. But despite how the religious tend to interpret them they have little to no relationship to one’s beliefs. One can have experiences of anatta (“no-self” in Theravada Buddhism) or satori (sudden, typically-temporary, enlightenment in Japanese Zen Buddhism) or recollection (a term from Christian mysticism) or kavana (Jewish mysticism) or whatever without accepting any particular belief system. There are secularized mindfulness and meditation practices that can increase one’s chances and frequency of experiencing these states.
But, unfortunately, the history of these experiences has been one of large religious organizations claiming and mostly exercising a monopoly on such experiences.
These experiences feel very deep and profound and can be a very positive (or negative!) thing, even affecting the overall course of one’s life. And they can be kindof addictive in a good way.
All that to say that I think any conversation about why people believe in religions today is incomplete without taking into account that for many people, their religion is their means of connection with some extremely profound and beautiful experiences. Though people only accept beliefs along with those experiences because they don’t know these experiences aren’t actually exclusive to any one religion or any set of beliefs. And those experiences are 100% real and tangible to them. (Whether they correspond to anything real in consensus reality is a whole other conversation, but the experiences themselves are a normal human phenomenon like orgasm or schadenfreude.)
Just some followup thoughts:
Like I alluded to earlier, meditation can be dangerous. Do your research first and know the risks.
If you want to know my personal beliefs, my beliefs are that beliefs don’t matter. Personal experience does. “But do you believe god exists?” Honestly it’d take me a good hour or more to give a proper answer to that question. Let’s go with “neither yes nor no” for the short version.
Every culture has these experiences. Humans likely have had them since humans have existed.
Thank you for taking the time to write this out, I probably would’ve been busy for a couple of hours trying to formulate my fairly similar take!
Maybe to add another aspect for - I think that the sheer ability of humans to have religious experiences in all denominations, which are often described as feelings of connectedness, does not necessarily mean that there is a higher being or reality “out there” that is being connected to in those moments.
But it does mean that our brains have religious experience as an in-built function (which, as you described, has been needlessly enshrined in religious institutions), which might mean that being able to have these experiences is an important part of being able to survive, or maybe even to thrive, as a human being, which also means as a community.
But it does mean that our brains have religious experience as an in-built function (which, as you described, has been needlessly enshrined in religious institutions), which might mean that being able to have these experiences is an important part of being able to survive, or maybe even to thrive, as a human being, which also means as a community.
And that’s a take that I couldn’t have put as well as you did, and I wholeheartedly agree with.
I think whatever cognitive faculties separate us from “the animals” (or at least some animals) comes at a cost. Most animals live very in the moment. We’re largely the only creatures that have panic attacks because of some imagined future event, and we worry constantly. The default mode network and the internal monologue let us plan for the future, but also makes us worry for the future, which is definitely maladaptive.
Religious experiences let us greatly mitigate that by showing us, even if only temporarily (and sometimes people can achieve permanence in this), by suspending the DMN and internal monologue.
Suspending worry for the future might be a plausible function for religious experience as an evolved feature of the human mind, yes.
I would also point towards the biological fact that while the existence of a higher being, consciousness or reality, is still ineffable, even after having had an experience that felt like there might be one, there is also an empirically true, measurable interconnectedness for humans that can be tapped into.
We live, and have evolved, in and through ecosystems that highly depend on interconnected species and processes that are so complex and intricate that we are still working on fully grasping them, and still discovering new connections (unfortunately, it’s becoming more and more because we have disrupted the connections by environmental damage, and the ecosystems start to fail due to that, making the connection obvious only after it ceased to exist). Connection between humans in the form of love in its many forms is also the ultimate glue that keeps societies together, and if that capacity diminishes due to circumstances, bad things tend to happen.
The myriad of connections we need to live, and to thrive and to feel like we are whole - all of this fully seen and experienced in their abstracted totality could in my eyes be one of the bases for religious experience.
And if that is true, it gives also another function - then, religious experience is the anchor and has a rebalancing function that makes sure that we don’t get lost in our own heads and human constructs, and keeps reminding us that we are part of the ecosystem, too, and keeps us from using it in a self-destructive manner. There are several deeply spiritual, nature-connected societies that only became so after a local environmental crisis caused by themselves. Tapping into the interconnectedness through religious experience has helped them find another, arguably better way.
(Of course, it doesn’t seem to be a hard, global fail-safe in human history, given the current state of the world, so I don’t know how direct this function would be.)
I think there’s something that always seems to get left out of these conversations and that’s that “when I practice my religion, I feel something that I don’t feel otherwise” is frequently a true statement for the religious.
I’ve often heard self-described atheists say that, often when conversing/debating with religious folks about why they believe, the conversation comes to a point where the religious person will say “I’ve just had a personal experience” and the atheist, unable to relate to that, really has no way to advance the conversation beyond that.
Were I opposite some fundamentalist Christian or something in such a situation, my response would be “yeah, me too! That’s totally normal.”
I think the beligerantly nonreligious either can’t relate to religious experiences or don’t want to admit to having had them for fear of embarassment or maybe rhetorical concessions. And the religious typically haven’t had such experiences outside the context of their religious practices, or if they have they still attribute it to their religious beliefs, and so take it as proof of their beliefs.
And these religious experiences are very real and very normal. Probably some people are more prone to such experiences than others. But despite how the religious tend to interpret them they have little to no relationship to one’s beliefs. One can have experiences of anatta (“no-self” in Theravada Buddhism) or satori (sudden, typically-temporary, enlightenment in Japanese Zen Buddhism) or recollection (a term from Christian mysticism) or kavana (Jewish mysticism) or whatever without accepting any particular belief system. There are secularized mindfulness and meditation practices that can increase one’s chances and frequency of experiencing these states.
But, unfortunately, the history of these experiences has been one of large religious organizations claiming and mostly exercising a monopoly on such experiences.
These experiences feel very deep and profound and can be a very positive (or negative!) thing, even affecting the overall course of one’s life. And they can be kindof addictive in a good way.
All that to say that I think any conversation about why people believe in religions today is incomplete without taking into account that for many people, their religion is their means of connection with some extremely profound and beautiful experiences. Though people only accept beliefs along with those experiences because they don’t know these experiences aren’t actually exclusive to any one religion or any set of beliefs. And those experiences are 100% real and tangible to them. (Whether they correspond to anything real in consensus reality is a whole other conversation, but the experiences themselves are a normal human phenomenon like orgasm or schadenfreude.)
Just some followup thoughts:
Thank you for taking the time to write this out, I probably would’ve been busy for a couple of hours trying to formulate my fairly similar take!
Maybe to add another aspect for - I think that the sheer ability of humans to have religious experiences in all denominations, which are often described as feelings of connectedness, does not necessarily mean that there is a higher being or reality “out there” that is being connected to in those moments.
But it does mean that our brains have religious experience as an in-built function (which, as you described, has been needlessly enshrined in religious institutions), which might mean that being able to have these experiences is an important part of being able to survive, or maybe even to thrive, as a human being, which also means as a community.
And that’s a take that I couldn’t have put as well as you did, and I wholeheartedly agree with.
I think whatever cognitive faculties separate us from “the animals” (or at least some animals) comes at a cost. Most animals live very in the moment. We’re largely the only creatures that have panic attacks because of some imagined future event, and we worry constantly. The default mode network and the internal monologue let us plan for the future, but also makes us worry for the future, which is definitely maladaptive.
Religious experiences let us greatly mitigate that by showing us, even if only temporarily (and sometimes people can achieve permanence in this), by suspending the DMN and internal monologue.
Suspending worry for the future might be a plausible function for religious experience as an evolved feature of the human mind, yes.
I would also point towards the biological fact that while the existence of a higher being, consciousness or reality, is still ineffable, even after having had an experience that felt like there might be one, there is also an empirically true, measurable interconnectedness for humans that can be tapped into.
We live, and have evolved, in and through ecosystems that highly depend on interconnected species and processes that are so complex and intricate that we are still working on fully grasping them, and still discovering new connections (unfortunately, it’s becoming more and more because we have disrupted the connections by environmental damage, and the ecosystems start to fail due to that, making the connection obvious only after it ceased to exist). Connection between humans in the form of love in its many forms is also the ultimate glue that keeps societies together, and if that capacity diminishes due to circumstances, bad things tend to happen.
The myriad of connections we need to live, and to thrive and to feel like we are whole - all of this fully seen and experienced in their abstracted totality could in my eyes be one of the bases for religious experience.
And if that is true, it gives also another function - then, religious experience is the anchor and has a rebalancing function that makes sure that we don’t get lost in our own heads and human constructs, and keeps reminding us that we are part of the ecosystem, too, and keeps us from using it in a self-destructive manner. There are several deeply spiritual, nature-connected societies that only became so after a local environmental crisis caused by themselves. Tapping into the interconnectedness through religious experience has helped them find another, arguably better way.
(Of course, it doesn’t seem to be a hard, global fail-safe in human history, given the current state of the world, so I don’t know how direct this function would be.)