Zulus or Europe for Psychology? And Shifts in Religious Paradigms? Crashing a Theist and a Non-Theist

Jim Harries 12 hrs ago I have explained – that belief in ‘gods’ is an outcome of ‘human contingency’, i.e., people can’t do without gods, but then the gods they ‘create’ oppress them, release from which oppression comes from knowledge of God, i.e., the one creator God. “killing apostates has nothing to do with it” you say. Hmmm. Interesting. You ‘state’ that the essence of believing is knowing something to be ‘true’. Wow again – maybe it is finding something to be helpful? That is quite different. (Do see here also: Asad, Talal, 2002. ‘The Construction of Religion as an Anthropological Category.’ 115-132 In: Lambeck, Michael, (ed.) A Reader in the Anthropology of Religion. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.) Asad tells us that your presupposed category, ‘religion’, is an invention of Christian theology. Children believe stories told to them – well, as do you, apparently. “It’s as simple as that” you suggest. They say ‘there are no atheists on the battlefield’. I suspect there’s a lot of truth in that. Someone might say ‘I’m not afraid of lions’, then run when they see a lion, or even ‘I’m never going to commit adultery’ (to their bride), but then they do. For you, at the moment, a publicly stated ‘non-belief’ suits. When it no longer suits, then (hopefully) you will change. But you see – what you state has little to do with truth. Your rendition of how some modern youth think about things divine strikes a familiar note. In other words: I worked through all those thought processes myself, … then found them faulty. I am glad you ‘doubt’. I wonder if you also ‘doubt your doubt’? Psychology is a big discipline for ‘little-me’ to take on. I do take it on, as I indicated before, because of ways it presupposes a ‘Western-post-Christian state’. The person coming up with psychology was not a Zulu in South Africa in 1830. It was someone in Europe, only. Now, because Europe (and the USA) have money, everyone says ‘yes, yes, yes I believe, give me more money’ when it comes to psychology, and much else. I see your main faith is in Wikipedia – I already suggested that today’s Western academia isn’t ‘neutral’, it’s justifying the existence of power differentials inherent to the status quo. Re. people becoming gods. I already suggested your great grandmother. She has (had) an ongoing profound influence on who you are today, She seems to fit your description in a prior contribution: “unobservable, spiritual, transcendent, conscious and intentional being, a 'personality' (similar to humans in that sense). A living being that is immaterial and that does or can influence the material-energy world.” Remember that psychology is a written discipline. There was no writing at the time the dispute (above) over washing socks came about. I like the notion ‘the force of thoughts’, as if there was something that was perceivable that was / is not thoughts. Yes, let’s wrap the discussion up now, so that my contribution be the last. Unlike1 Lieven Van Vaerenbergh 5 hrs ago Dear Jim, The problem with the discussion with you is that you apparently already assume a priori that you are right in believing in God. I have experienced both situations, I have been an active Catholic believer for 30 years and afterwards gradual doubt has grown to unbelief. I wonder if you can still stand and will and dare to stand in the doubt. You seem to be so steeped in your belief in God that it seems you can no longer get into my arguments. They slip past you. You do not have to go along with these arguments of doubt, but if you don't and can't, I think you will find it difficult to really understand me and will only continue to judge and sometimes condemn. I often notice from your answers that they don't really go into the depths of what I am saying. You go over or around it with all kinds of statements of faith on top of it. You seem unable to question faith itself and as such. Apparently, it has to be an enormous obviousness, something that is firmly programmed into your mind. In your responses to me, it seems to be a 'trying to prove faith and god with faith and god'. This is how I feel we remain on the spot. Such reasoning is 'begging the question'. A well-known fallacy. Answers such as 'Hmmm, interesting' and 'wow!' are of little use to me and they sound rather ironic, you don't take it seriously and it seems like a convenient method to avoid having to discuss it further. Believing in the sense of 'assuming that something is true' is at the same time usually useful, yes. Believing in a god is useful for believing people, otherwise they would probably not believe. A great use of it can be a spiritual support, finding a meaning to life in it. Also, a moral footing. And, perhaps, the great benefit that, if one believes in god and behaves as it is written that a god desires, then one is rewarded with an eternal heaven. That is quite useful, isn't it? People also build on their assumptions, on their supposed truths of faith. Sometimes they build their whole worldview on them and that gives them something to hold on to. Belief in a god is often locked into a very fixed paradigm. Faith rarely evolves as far as the vision of faith, the doctrine of faith, the image of God are concerned. Especially if one has an old book in which letters are written black on white and if one wants to take all those words for absolute truth and literally as words of god. There are some light interpretations, for example, there are some splits in Christianity (Roman, Protestant, Reformed, Orthodox...) Rarely do we see a paradigm shift in god belief. Yes, with the science of Darwinian evolution some have started to interpret the Genesis story a little differently. Sometimes very convulsively. Instead of a literal reading, some are now interpreting more figuratively, symbolically, metaphorically. But the letters remain the letters. Even though we sometimes find children's Bible translations in which the language is adapted to children's level. In science, paradigm shifts go more smoothly. Science does not pretend to be a permanent truth. Something is only true until the opposite or a better truth is demonstrated. The insights into heredity, DNA, genetic variations, mutations, evolutionary mechanisms...have created a new paradigm in the sciences. We can now better explain and link many things. Similarly, the breakthrough of the geocentric world view must have been a tremendous paradigm shift in science. The knowledge that not everything in the cosmos revolves around the earth. That we are not the centre of the universe. That the sun does not revolve around the earth. But, religions remain what and how they are for centuries. I see very few paradigm shifts there. I see, above all, many diverse religions, each with its fixed, unchanging paradigm. Despite attempts at ecumenism, each religion sticks to its own vision, doctrine, views on what, how, who their god is. Then I ask myself 'can all those religions be right?', who has the most right belief, the most right idea about god? I did not understand what you meant by that story about 'no fear of lions'. Yes, indeed, I have openly declared a 'non-belief' here. That is my present condition after thirty years of 'well-belief'. It is not a question of 'fitting or not fitting me'. It has simply grown in me. That's the way it is with world views, they form in your head, you choose them, you don't make them. Nor do you choose the colour of the glasses through which you perceive the world. That is so typical of the subjective nature of our being. Sometimes, as new insights seep in, you begin to discover that you have been looking through particular spectacles all along and you begin to see things differently, but then again you are looking through new spectacles and you do not realise it. We cannot but look at reality through spectacles and from frames and paradigms. I am almost sure that my view will evolve, will change. That this will then become a 'belief in a god' is not yet a certainty. You may hope so for me. But do not worry about me. You say about me that what I say has little to do with truth. Then you don't see that every person forms his own truth. That THE truth is very difficult to state because we are all subjective beings who view the world through our own coloured glasses. I remain a thinking, searching and yes, fortunately also doubting human being. Those who stop doubting run the risk of thinking dogmatically, fundamentalistically. One must dare to keep questioning things, it seems to me. I am sure of one thing, and that is that I doubt 😉 So I don't doubt about my doubt. By 'doubt' I mean that I don't have the idea that I have the truth. As for psychology again, psychology, before it became a science, has always existed. There is always psychology between people. We are constantly probing each other's psychology within relationships. We estimate what the other thinks, how he feels. For centuries we have been probing the other person's character, temperament, typical way of reacting. Psychological insight is a gift, an added value in communication and in dealing with other people. You are once again making an interpretation, you are again putting something in my mouth by saying that 'your main belief lies in Wikipedia'. That is not the case at all! Look, such unjustified statements from you make discussion with you difficult. Wikipedia can be a bit of a help when you want to get a definition or a bit of an explanation of something like 'Enlightenment' (because it turned out that you have a very different approach to it). Hence my reference to Wikipedia. Of course, there is much more literature that deals with things in a much deeper, more extensive and more differentiated way. Your comparison of belief in God with the influence of a great-grandmother is inadequate. I know I must have had a great-grandmother even though I have never seen or known her, and I know that of course a small influence of her life can possibly have some influence on my life now, given that my parents and their parents were raised by each other and passed on things. So, I must have somehow unconsciously inherited some ideas and moral values and so on from ancestors I never knew. In that sense, the prehistoric people even have an influence on me somewhere. That is logical. But with believing in a god, it is something quite different. The existence of that god must first be demonstrated, proven. That I have distant grandparents is plausible, given that I know that I was born from parents and that my parents were born from other parents and so on. With a family tree reconstruction, I can even find out who distant ancestors were. That is how I know they exist. However, I do not know if a god exists, I cannot find out if it exists and therefore I cannot know if it has any influence on me. Of course, my distant ancestors may have been conscious, persons with mental capacity, and they are invisible to me (especially if I don't have a picture of them). But your comparison does not hold. It is also not at all certain that those ancestors are still alive today as spirits as one assumes of a god. Your comparison is only valid if god really exists and if people indeed still exist as invisible spirits after their death and can influence people today. I'm sorry to say, I have a lot of trouble reading and interpreting many of your texts because they seem so incoherent to me. It is often a loose concatenation of various statements, jumping from one subject to another in my opinion, so that in the end it is not clear to me where you are going, what you are actually saying or want to say. That makes the dialogue very tiring for me. Those are reasons not to continue the dialogue. I have made another attempt here to respond to your points, not in order to have the last word, but to try once more to make clear what I have already said. You can have the last word from me. 😊 I promise to be silent after that. 😊 (Translated from Dutch with the help of DeepL app). Unlike1 Green Peacemst < 1 min ago Jim Harries, wonderful to read your dialogue here with LVV. I identify a lot with your position. You are emphasizing something about the unique role of the European Christian theist culture and its development of modern psychology, a fine point of focus I´ll note. I might add the larger empirical view, summed up as transpersonal psychosocial and historical philosophical scholarship (with empiricism), that I have developed, that is University-based, UN human rights society with structured pluralism, with the underlying closer of "Jesus´ legacy of loving integrity for Moses et al and God." The modern elements, also imply the likes of anthropology and cross-cultural psychology, transpersonal no less as in Michael Harner´s shamanic techniques, association, and developing legacy community. Sociology, too. And all the related psychosocial disciplines, philosophical at root using empirical methodology. All of that, then, feeds into Comparative Religious Studies and the philosophy of metaphysics/religion. And they are fairly new, with Huston Smith having influenced me starting in the 1980s based on his 1950s-60s book. I´ve more recently learned about Robert Bellah and Ninian Smart. I bring all that up to emphasize the meaning of structured pluralism and diversity in conjunction with the unification through globalization that has occurred. While the Zulu´s didn´t invent psychology, for example, they and Africa´s wonderful and good indigenous qualities already were channeled up to and through American rock n´roll, somewhat famously. The Police Sting´s songs "Invisible Sun", "Spirits in the Material World," "Driven To Tears," and "Secret Journey" and many more aren´t part of pop music fodder at best. They are truly forms of spiritual-religious phenomena, practice, and knowledge, which would structure an experience perhaps for someone like me oriented adequately. With their reggae styling, no less. As far as they went for Sting the pop star who did some pro-social things for a while, then became complacent, apparently, as far as I know. Additional insights emerge as I reflect on my own path emerging with appreciating a non-objectifying, transcendent, personal relationship with a "creative continuum that is always accessible" as I distilled descriptive concepts from H Smith´s presentation of the Chinese Tao. And much more through Buddhism, and modern approaches like self-help transpersonal psychology like John Bradshaw´s and related support groups. With interest in Unitarian Universalism, no less, Quakerism, and Christian Science most centrally, all building around my own college degree in liberal arts Bio Anthropology. Christianity can and needs to be analyzed and understood for its problems and limitations. Its success no less can be extended and established adequately for its boundaries in globalization. The formulation I see, then, goes something like this. Humans as Merchants, soldiers, and politicians have appropriated the fruits of monastic school-University knowledge and spread it through globalization. Because of Jesus´ loving integrity standard, we now have a historical sociology of leaders emerging in resurgent integrity with Jesus Christ in various forms, and we have those from other traditions benefiting from their alternative spiritual-religious origins with the capacity to present integrity from a new level of syncretism. Gandhi is a landmark example. He was a secular, anti-Christian law student in London when he went to a vegetarian club and met theosophists. Those theosophists rekindled and reoriented his interest in Hinduism, and gave him a more philosophical interfaith orientation to spiritual-religious studies, including the Bible for Jesus and modern dissenting/academic/activist Christians in resurgent integrity. Gandhi, thus, had been plugged into globalizing secularized Christian culture sociologically, and was able to align with Jesus´ integrity using University-based and society-related tools. In Jesus´ legacy of structured pluralism. Cheers. And thank you for the chance to reflect in potential dialogue with you and LVV. Like Green Peacemst < 1 min ago Dear Lieven Van Vaerenbergh, Very interesting for me to read your dialogue with JH. I read through, and then skimmed back to target this idea of yours, that you haven´t seen changes in religious paradigms like has occurred in "science." What I observe then is also your response about "psychology" that JH mentioned from his angle. You replied to the effect that psychology has always existed. Your statement misses a key aspect that isn´t necessarily made clear by JH. It is that modern University-based psychology is not just shop talk, or even indigenous gems of wisdom, and their often important and informative systems of knowledge that anthropology has done wonders to try to preserve and study. In fact, that makes a larger point, that psychology isn´t the only system of knowledge. Just as "science" isn´t just another indigenous technical scheme like Babylonian astronomy or Egyptian pyramid building skills with some technical and mathematical type flourishes. Psychology is a central field, with some overlap, in the psychosocial studies disciplines (a term I prefer to social sciences and humanitis, etc). That is, to be even clearer, philosophical forms of scholarship with empiricism. That is also, not physical scientific natural philosophy with its scientific empirical method. It is in fact that kind of material that filled my college degree in liberal arts Bio Anthropology. It turns out that they included my interest in the evolution of speech, symbolic behavior, interaction, and religious ritual, including some on cave paintings"! that has been informing my thinking on these matters. Biologist turned philosopher M Pigliucci went up against WL Craig as an anti-theist, and turned to the Limits of Science, asserting more recently, "Science is a kind of philosophy, not the other way around." That becomes helpful as we bring our human behavior in "science" back into focus, including some parts of T Kuhn´s insight about paradigm shifts. Not just "paradigms", however, but all our "science" is constructed out of word symbols and the like. No matter how accurate it has been, it is not the Universe, but our mapping symbols as cognitive tool type knowledge, in human communities. The term "science" itself reflects how technophiles got carried away with the thrill of scientific accomplishment, with technology no less! amplified by business ambitions! War against fascists! Communists! All of that, led by the US view in many cases. Losing focus on the fact that as word-symbols, it is not that Einstein actually rode on a beam of light. He imagined it to help him in his philosophical reflections, balancing spatial and logical reasoning, etc. Which brings us to a point I note from an earlier comment of yours about "reductionism." The pro-active concept is emergentism. I refer to physicist philosopher Fritjof Capra centrally around that, and his Systems View of Life. Physics is one system overall, but even has systems within it, systems of phenomena that we humans have captured, or begun to capture, or try to represent and have represented. Einstein was multitudinous in all that. Newton´s classical mechanics got relativistic with e=mc2, energy-matter equivalence, while leading to Quantum mechanics so vigorously that Einstein was stuck being labeled, "Old Quantum mechanics"! Oh, well. We are talking about different phenomena realms, and thanks then to G Lemaitre et al´s using astronomical data like red shifts, we have extrapolated to the Big Bang hypothesis. We have a cause-effect framework of phenomena that we understand already amply with our philosophical symbols. Abiogenesis wasn´t just solved simply by Urey et al´s experiment, no less. It was historical like baking a unique cake Babylonian blue ceramics, or the making of Japanese samurai steel. They´re still trying to get through the complexity. If we don´t need, at least I don´t see it so far, to insert God specifically in abiogenesis, we do see emergentism vividly in the shift from the chemical to the biological. A systemic shift with three orders, and weak and strong so far part of classifying phenomena in our symbolic knowledge. Self-replicating DNA is that new level of information being reproduced and perpetuated. On went evolution up to mammals, and we perceive levels of consciousness in cats and dogs, elephants and dolphins. Senses of self and identity, relationship. Forms of agency and emotional experience. And then, on the evolutionary timeline, our common ancestor with chimpanzees, our closes species cousin. We humans, meanwhile, had the mechanism that Pavlov identified ringing a bell with meat to get salivating dogs, that JB Watson showed with the Little Albert experiment with a gong and making a boy scared of a fluffy rabbit. Mary Counsel Jones then learned to restore the calm with "desensitization." The implications go further, and anthropologist ED Chapple laid it out studying fieldwork like Malinowski´s, and noting how the leaves of a tree used for turtle nets were used in an initiation ritual. Emotional-interaction patterns, later "rhythms." Then up to, or back to, Freud, the neurologist, around 1896, who sat down with his patients with pain but no organic disease. He didn´t use a microscope at that point. He asked them to relax, to touch their pain, and to let their mind wander. His listening and notes were what he studied, not microscopes at that point. He discovered and labeled the empirical "id" and "ego" as in "It hurts" and "I remember this, and I feel better." The id and ego, then superego. "I wanted to help." All symbolic language. Word-symbols. Words as symbols. It is that empirical clarity that helps us organize our thinking, and our use of philosophical knowledge as we do. So, then, back to your personal observation that you don´t see religious paradigms shifting. Well, I might offer the suggestion at this point that you consider a few things. Consider that Universities are hotbeds of thinking, and University-related thinking even more so. Fritjof Capra? He wrote The Tao of Physics. JB Cobb? He took AN Whitehead et al´s thinking to advance Process Theology. Karen Armstrong has delved into the History of Religions while acknowledging spiritual-religious experience. And now she focuses on practice for compassion. Gandhi was secular and anti-Christian when he went to study law in London, and as a vegetarian, bumped into the Veggie Club, where he met theosophists. There´s one, from Helen Blavatsky et al. Gandhi got reoriented to interfaith Hinduism, and inspired to study the Bible for Jesus and modernized dissident high integrity Christians like Thoreau. Gandhi. In the US, I encountered a Unitarian Universalist interfaith congregation in my hometown outside New York City in the 1980s already, but they were founded by two merging Christian denominations in 1961. That´s a lot of foundational material that I have been working with, that has me locating my "church" in the post-Aquinas, post-Luther, US Civil Right of Freedom of Religion, and UN human right, based in University-based philosophy of religion and comparative religious studies. Huston Smith himself identified as an interfaith Christian and practicing some Muslim prayer. I have found it necessary to identify the empirical reality of spiritual-religious phenomena to overcome that neglect. Thus, medically attested, medically impossible healings with spiritual religious testimony are one primary form. C Keener wrote Miracles as an academic work on the subject. The CAtholics have actually been tracking that since Lourdes and with canonizations. Christian Science has some good material. And there are more on video online, like the Mayo Clinic in the testimony of Marlene Klepees healing from cerebral palsy in a prayer-vision-church sequence, and many more. Then, there is WL Craig´s arguments for God, with the Kalam Cosmological argument an excellent fit with emergentism. That and his argument on the Resurrection of Jesus. As an interfaith UU Quaker Christian, I add in the structured pluralism that Jesus has made possible through what is Jesus´ legacy in University-based society. It reflects how Christian knowledge was appropriated by its human merchant, soldier, and politician materialists who spread University-based society the way that people have done in dog-eat-dog, law of the jungle society whenever possible, in conquest and plunder, with violence and enslavement. Christianity, in Jesus´ legacy, however, has a self-correcting mechanism at its core. While ideological individualism has been misdirected by materialism, spiritual individualism now is the objective that I see. It is the central operative unit I think we observe in UN human rights community of nations. Currently, however, individuals are oriented primarily by materialism, and need spiritual orientation as can be facilitated by all kinds of practices and study, not least of all the recent classics tai chi, yoga, Buddhist meditation, support groups, and more. Thank you for this chance to participate and offer my thoughts with you!