David Philpot

[David Philpot]

In the world of religious belief, community replaces evidence.  Sam Harris once said, “”This is the true horror of religion. It allows perfectly decent and sane people to believe by the billions, what only lunatics could believe on their own.” I believe that most people try to form their world views in a rational manner in almost every endeavor, except religion.  Faith beliefs require gaps in the believer’s evidentiary chains large enough to drive a bus through, but religious people jump that gap like metephysical Evil Knievels. In order for religious indoctrination to work the believers must deny the reality of what is happening right in front of them (a negative hallucination), and then use mystification or magical thinking (a positive hallucination), in order to organize their religious experience and implant it where reality was previously. Religious communities rely on the mutual support from one another to reinforce the minimally counterintuitive beliefs that form the basis of their religion. For the average community members who are casually religious, the beliefs are not very extreme and don’t require substantial effort or committment from the believer to remain a member of the group. For the members of the the inner circle,  who often serve in the role of spiritual leaders, a “deeper” spiritual understanding is expected and a more tenuous chain of evidence in their world view is seen as a sign of greater faith and of attaining a higher spiritual understanding.  In cultures from all over the world, people who would now be diagnosed as having a schitzotypal personality disorder were given a shamanistic role in tribal life, and their visions and dreams were valued as communications from the spirit realm. These people would be considered to be low on the schitzophrenic continuum, because they could still contribute to the social/survival needs of the community without being a hinderance. In the Bible the importance of dreams and visions are seen throughout both the OT and the NT as attributes of the divine which could guide individuals and nations in ways that would please the gods. Special pleading is the lingua franca of the spirit world and it allowed people to see whatever they wanted to see in their holy books and to hear whatever they wanted to hear from their holy men, and that hasn’t changed one iota. A sufficiently vague verse or comment is considered to be both prophetic and profound for the spiritually credulous.  ” I am that I am ” has been seen as a philosophically irreplacable missive direct from the lips of Yahweh, when in the language of the era it meant ordinary, or usual, or nothing special. Without special pleading religion could not have endured as well as it has, and it has the added benefit of being the perfect trapdoor for difficult questions and God’s moral quandaries. Religion allowed cultures to have beneficial bonding experiences from their shared mythology, but it also created a safe barrier for the tribal cheif  when punishment needed to be carried out because it was the Gods who were calling for the guilty person’s  whipping or death. Special pleading is the Swiss Army knife of religious justification, it’s handy, easy to use, and can be pulled out at a moments notice when it is needed.

[David Philpot]

I find it particularily odd that theists consider their religious faith to be evidence of God’s existence when even they would not consider that kind of personal experience to be evidence in any other aspect of their lives. Harmonizing the Gospels is one of the greatest con jobs in history, theists try to convince people that the fact that the details contained in them don’t match one another is an argument for their authenticity. Some of the  central details of the Gospels are  slightly different, but others are entirely contradictory to one another and that does not seem to matter to believers. I have heard that the differences in the Gospels denotes that there was no central authority controlling  how they were written, which seems perfectly sensible to me. However, I have heard some theists claim that the contradictions are essential because they test a person’s faith. That is playing tennis without the net; if both the consistencies and the inconsistencies in the text of the Bible are seen as equally vital to a person’s faith, then the text itself becomes irrelevant. The belief that faith is evidence is unfalsifiable, and if everyone’s personal  faith experience is their Truth then the word truth must be used in such a generalized way that it too becomes irrelevant and meaningless. People assume that in conversations about religion that others use words to mean the same thing that they do, when in fact, that happens very infrequently. Entire congregations listen to sermons assuming that a specific common message is being shared by all; but this is a perfect example of the metaphor, the map is not the territory. The words used in the sermon become the map when spoken by the preacher, but the territory each of the congregants visits are distinctly different though they hear the same words. The illusion of a shared spiritual vision is created by special pleading, as a way to unify the personal experiences of  the congregants, in much the same way the disparate messages in the Gospels are harmonized in the minds of believers.

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