h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Otto - is my memory playing up very badly or didn't you used to believe in God? (Sometime while I've been on h2g2, i.e. the last few years.) If so, when did you change and for what reason? (If you don't mind me asking.)

Hi Dogster,

Well, I was brought up Catholic, though my father was agnostic. Both my parents were left wing, progressive Guardian-reading liberals. The religious people I knew growing up were generally also left wing liberals - Catholics, but supporters of CAFOD (the Catholic OXFAM), Amnesty International, Jubilee 2000, CND, that kind of thing. I knew that the *letter* of Catholic moral law said various rather unpleasant things, but I didn't really believe it and furthermore never met anyone else who did either. As long as this lasted I was content call myself a Catholic, and believe in a God who, if not a "Catholic" God as such, at least could be found through Catholicism as one among many routes.

As a child and as a teenager I experienced God as a real presence, and had two quasi-religious experiences which I could not explain at the time. One, with the benefit of hindsight, I can now explain rationally. The other is more difficult, and still puzzles me. Having said that, my everyday experience of God generally faded as I got older.

My "Road from Damascus" was when a visiting priest came to the Parish and gave a homily (sermon) that was much more fundamentalist than I could accept - roughly, that if you were living in sin (or "an unmarried couple living as if they were married") you weren't going to heaven, regardless of whatever else you've done in your life. That was unacceptable to me, and that was it. Broad church is one thing, but only one of us could be a Catholic, and it turns out it wasn't me. But I kept believing pretty much what I had always believed, but just didn't want to be associated with Catholicism any more. I was very angry for quite a long time about this. I was around 17 when this happened.

The odd postcript is that when the parish priest asked after me, she told him what had been said and he was appalled. Partly because it wasn't his view, and partly because he didn't think the priest who'd said it believed it either!

Since then, I've called myself a deist humanist, and sometimes an agnostic humanist. In many ways I'd like to be more agnostic/atheist than I am, because it would sit better with my other views. But I just can't quite make the leap of unfaith. So I don't really know what I think any more.

So I've experienced religious faith and been part of a religious community, and now my thought process is entirely secular, if not my metaphysical beliefs. I concluded long ago that the existence or otherwise of God makes no difference whatsoever to how we should behave, so my metaphysical speculations don't really have any further consequences.

I put something in my journal about a year ago ('The Shrill of Secular Illiberalism') on this, but roughly I advocate tolerance and understanding where agreement cannot be reached, as this is the only way I can see a pluralistic state functioning. I think people deserve to be treated with respect. Although that doesn't preclude valid criticism of beliefs and religions - or mockery - it does preclude (IMO) slander, libel, and stereotyping. One of the worst slanders against gay men was the attempt to conflate homosexuality with paedophilia. Yet people who would be up in arms about this think nothing of making throwaway remarks about all Catholic priests being paedophiles. That goes beyond valid criticism of a genuine organisational failing, and becomes slander.

And that upsets me, because I knew (and know) a lot of very good people who are religious. Their faith is important to them, and they do their best to love their neighbour, whether it's someone next door or in the developing world. They volunteer in the community, they make the world a better place. These people are not intolerant, they're not stupid, they're not delusional, and they're not about to impose their views on others.

The same can be said of many atheists, of course. And I'll defend atheists (or more broadly, those of no religious faith) from theist slanders too. But typically the atheists are in a very vocal majority here, and the theists sometimes lack good advocates, partly because of the vitriol heaped on people from some quarters.

Thanks for that Otto, it's very interesting. As someone who has never believed, I still have no real understanding of what it would be like to believe in God. I'm not sure I ever will.

Have you read Joyce's "Portrait of the artist as a young man"? I seem to recall he has a similar experience of the nastier side of religious teaching in that book (again, with respect to hell in particular).

I agree with all you say about the atheist vs theist debate, particularly at the moment on h2g2. The 'Richard Dawkins' thread really seems to have degenerated over the last week or two (and that's degeneration from a low starting point).

I've been meaning to write an article (perhaps for the post) on the phenomenology of the religious and a-religious experience of everyday life. I won't call it that, obviously.

At various times in various threads I've tried to communicate what it's like to have faith, or what it felt like for me. When atheists ask for 'evidence', the theist doesn't really understand the question, because they have all of the evidence they need in the way the world feels. In turn, many theists can't understand how atheists can't sense God, and tell them that they need to "open your heart" or something, or worse, accuse them of lying or having some serious character flaw.

The theist thus has all of the evidence that she needs, but can't communicate or explain it very well, often because they can't understand that others experience the world differently. And even if they can, there's no reason for the atheist to accept it as evidence - why should they accept someone else's subjective experience as being more valid than their own? So either they think that really their evidence is from a holy book, and then call them stupid for believing it, or if they do accept the account of their experience, they dismiss them as deluded.

That particular thread moves very fast, so I've been dipping in and out. It has gone down hill, and on days like today I find it harder and harder to remember why I bother defending theism from atheist fundamentalist slander and misunderstanding when they do such a poor job of making their own case.

I for one would be very interested in that article if you decide to write it. I've long felt that the only religious position I could have any real respect for would be the one of someone who has, as you say, a sense of God. I can conceive of such a thing, but not actually imagine it. And, although as a materialist I don't give any credence to such a sense of God, I can at least respect that for someone who did have it, life would be very different - they would fundamentally perceive it in a different way to me. I can engage with someone like that because even if there isn't complete mutual understanding, there's enough.

Do you think that most religious people have this sense? I have tended to suppose that it's fairly uncommon, and that most people just don't think about it very deeply (they believe because others around them believe). That's not necessarily a criticism - you can't think deeply about everything, and no doubt there are many things I just accept without thinking about.

To be honest, I don't know. The problem with introspection is that (obviously) it's not transferable.

I think you're right about religion being a community phenomenon that reinforces faith. Churches will typically have all kinds of groups and community activities - socials, youth clubs, fetes and fayres and so on. And it's good to belong to a group, and there's much about religious adherence that is about belonging and identification with other humans. And it's a lot to give up, so I suspect that there are plenty of people who don't have particularly strong faith but who are 'culturally religious'. I suspect much of my family are or were like that.

But I don't think that the community element is enough by itself to sustain religious belief without something else going on behind it linked to the way that people see the world. Talking to some of h2g2's theists, I've asked these kind of questions often in an attempt to get atheists to try to understand. Some have said that they literally hear God talking to them, which I never did. It felt much more like stray thoughts, odd feelings, premonitions, gut instincts. The kind of thing I still get today, but don't regard as being supernatural in origin.

I think that the existence of educated, intelligent religious people really ought to be enough to scupper the arguments of the atheist fundamentalists, and I've never yet had a satisfactory explanation for their existence from those who go beyond personal atheism to outright intolerance. Yes, communities play a part, and yes there may be some compartmentalisation going on, which humans are well capable of. But there's no other example that I can think of of large numbers of intelligent people holding some other kind of "delusion" through compartmentalisation. So there has to be something else going on....

"But there's no other example that I can think of of large numbers of intelligent people holding some other kind of "delusion" through compartmentalisation."

I'm not so sure, but possibly I'm not sure exactly what you're getting at with the word compartmentalisation. I'd say there's lots of historical examples of large numbers of intelligent people holding a delusion because of social pressures. If anything, I'd say it was pretty much ubiquitous. Think about things like: slavery, imperialism, colonialism, fascism, soviet and chinese communism, apartheid, etc. I'd also add capitalism as a notable example, but that's perhaps a little more controversial. (I expect many years in the future people will look back and talk about capitalism in the same way we talk about all those other things on that list.)

"I think that the existence of educated, intelligent religious people really ought to be enough to scupper the arguments of the atheist fundamentalists..."

It was enough for me. Dunno if you read this blog post I wrote (I posted on the Dawkins thread):

http://thesamovar.wordpress.com/2006/10/28/confessions-of-a-reformed-fundamentalist/

Greetings from Russia, Otto and Dogster
It was good to read this conversation - really, really good.
Best wishes,
Elena

Glad it was interesting for you!

I'm not quite sure what people mean about 'compartmentalisation'. I take it to mean something like being intelligent and rational and scientific about areas x and y, but not z.

I think the things you list are more people just being wrong rather than being examples of compartmentalisation. Although I suppose things like house prices and dotcom bubbles might be examples of delusions. And perhaps the kind of blind eye turning that went on in Nazi Germany to what was happening to the Jews.

I read your blog post when you first mentioned it (and I've replied to your post on insurance), and it's excellent. I will try and put something down on paper at some point about atheist and theist phenomenology, as I am getting increasingly irritated by some of the bigotry. It's okay not to understand something you've never experienced, but it's not okay to make a virtue of that.

Hey Otto - I just noticed your post on my insurance blog entry and wrote a reply there.

Re compartmentalisation - my feeling is that in the case of (for example) slavery, it would be difficult to have any doubt that it was wrong. Continuing to be a part of it whilst living your ordinary, everyday, civilised life, would mean you had to compartmentalise.

But thinking about it again, I'm not sure my examples can't be explained in two other ways. Firstly, as you say, people might not have known about it, although there is probably a wilful element to this. Secondly, people might have known about it but felt powerless to fight it as an individual. That's definitely the impression one gets reading descriptions of people in communist countries for example.