religion – Thoughts from Rose Avenue

Holy Ravioli

During our two-month sojourn in London, Debra and I lived in a basement flat in an area called West Kensington, midway between Hammersmith and Fulham. “West Kensington,” so far as I can tell, is not an official designation, but merely the informal name of a neighborhood, and the neighborhood’s only connection with the actual Kensington is that it happens to lie west of it. In fact, West Kensington and Kensington are in entirely different boroughs — the former in the Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham, the latter in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea.

I was indignant when I first heard the names of these respective municipalities. Why were we consigned to merely a “borough,” while Kensington and Chelsea got to be a “royal borough”? Were they somehow better than us? I imagined Charles III brushing up on his newly acquired kingdom, hearing “Kensington and Chelsea” read out from a list and saying, “Yep, that’s one of mine,” then hearing “Hammersmith and Fulham” and saying, “Hmm, never heard of it. You say it’s a borough?”

It turns out that the designation “royal” is given to boroughs in which the royal family maintains a residence, and that there’s nothing otherwise special about them. If Charles and Camilla were to establish a pied-à-terre in West Kensington, I imagine that it would suddenly become a royal borough as well.

The concept of a “royal borough” made me think of another designation that always mystified me: a “holy city.” Back in the days of the Iranian revolution, news reports often mentioned “the holy city of Qom.” We don’t hear much about Qom anymore, but there appear to be plenty of other cities considered holy by one religion or another, such as Mecca, Medina, Amritsar, Karbala, and of course, Jerusalem.

If we posit an omnipresent God who brought the universe into being, then I’d assume that everything God created would have to be equally holy. Unlike the British monarch, God isn’t known to maintain residences in a finite number of locations. So how can some cities be considered holy and others not?

An additional philosophical problem regarding holy cities is wherein the holiness resides. Is a holy city made up of individual holy items — holy buildings, holy trees, holy sewer pipes — such that if one of them were to be transported outside of the city, it would retain its holiness? Or is the holiness associated with a particular geographical boundary, such that an Amazon package gains or loses its holy qualities depending on whether it’s delivered inside or outside the city limits? And how does the principle apply to human beings, who may autonomously engage in activities that can be more or less holy? If someone were to open a strip club in Jerusalem, would it ipso facto qualify as a holy strip club, or would it proportionally detract from the overall holiness of the city?

Clearly, the people who live in — or make pilgrimages to — holy cities aren’t bothered by such questions, leading me to wonder what they’re seeing that I’m not.

As a nonreligious person, I don’t really have a category called “holy.” But I do have one called “sacred” (in a secular sense) and I guess the two aren’t that different. For example, I’d say that a diploma is sacred: It’s physically just a piece of paper, but you wouldn’t fold it up to fit in your pocket, or scribble notes on the back of it, as you might with any other piece of paper. For most people, a national flag is sacred. A work of art is sacred. For that matter, any object to which we have an emotional attachment can be said to be sacred.

All of these are instances of our ascribing meaning and value to an object that go beyond its physical worth or utility. The meaning and value of a sacred object are not inherent in the object itself; they’re a product of our relationship with the object. I assume that what’s true of “sacred” is also true of “holy.” To call a thing (or a city) “holy” is a convenient bit of verbal shorthand for saying that we, for whatever reason, regard it and treat it as if it has deep significance, while recognizing that in the physical world, the thing itself remains just a thing. Perhaps only the king can decide that a British borough is royal, but any one of us can decide that a city is holy.

Posted January 11, 2023 by Mark S
Category: Language

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Atmosphere (3)

(part three of four)

I once knew a woman who had grown up in a nonreligious family, and who remained an atheist into adulthood. Then, when she was about 30, some combination of circumstances brought her to visit an Eastern Orthodox church. In the church, she saw a painted icon whose eyes dripped tears of fragrant oil. She was incredibly moved by this experience. She returned to the church, soaked up some of the oil in a wad of cotton, and kept it in a small glass jar. Eventually, she converted to the Eastern Orthodox faith.

I found this chain of events incomprehensible. I had always known her as an intelligent, sensible person. Surely, I said to her, there was some earthly cause, some scientific explanation, for the icon’s tears.

“You weren’t there,” she said simply. Naturally, she said, her first thought had been that this was some sort of trick. But she could find no physical source for the tears, and no way they could have passed through the eyes of the icon. More important, there was evidently something undetectable by the senses — something in the atmosphere of that church — that penetrated deep inside of her and was able to overcome her lifelong habits of mind. For her, there was no question that this weeping icon was a miracle, a tangible sign of God’s presence.

I like to think that if I were there, I could have figured out (or at least devised a reasonable hypothesis for) what was making the icon cry. But as she said, I wasn’t there. And in the absence of independent evidence, who am I to doubt the reality of what she experienced?

After all, the way each one of us looks at the world is determined by our own experience. If I prefer to view the world rationally, it’s because experience has taught me that rational thought leads to answers that I find satisfactory. But there’s no proof of the rightness of rationality, other than that it feels right. The most elementary rules of logic — that a thing must either be A or not A; if A equals B, then B equals A; and so forth — are not provable. We believe them, and build our whole scientific worldview on top of them, because they appear self-evident.

Yet if there’s something in us that recognizes the truth of these logical axioms, then why should we not trust that same internal arbiter when it recognizes truth in other places? Science can establish facts about the world, but those facts are not always sufficient to explain our experience. In our experience, there are certain things that feel unquestionably true — as undeniable as the fact that A equals A. When scientific facts and theories don’t support what feels undeniably true to us, it’s reasonable to seek alternative explanations.

I’ve met several people over the years who claimed to have psychic ability of one kind or another. None of them earned a living as a mind-reader or fortune-teller; I saw no evidence that they were engaging in intentional fraud. So far as I could tell, they genuinely believed that they had the ability to read people’s thoughts, predict the future, or do something similar. In their experience, enough people had responded positively — “Why, yes, that’s true! How could you possibly have known that?” — that they had come to accept their talents as a fact.

I’m sure an investigator such as the late James Randi would have no reason to doubt these psychics’ sincerity, or to claim that their successful readings hadn’t occurred. He would suggest only that they’ve interpreted their experience selectively — that they tend to remember the instances in which they were right, and tend to forget (or explain away) the instances in which they were wrong.

I once heard Randi tell a story which, as I remember it, went like this: A woman claimed that she had the power to find buried or hidden gold. Randi asked her how reliable this power was, and the woman replied, “It always works, 100 percent of the time.” As a first step toward testing the woman’s claim, Randi set out five wooden boxes, one of which had a piece of gold in it, and then asked the woman to pick out the box that held the gold. The woman chose the wrong box.

“Didn’t you say you’re successful 100 percent of the time?” said Randi.

“When I have the power,” replied the woman, “it works 100 percent of the time. I guess today I didn’t have the power.”

In defining their abilities such that their claims couldn’t be proven false, Randi said, people like this woman were refusing to play by the rules of science. Their rejection of the scientific method could mean only two things: either they were out-and-out frauds, trying to outsmart him and his fellow investigators; or they were sadly ignorant.

I’m not convinced that those are the only two possibilities. Living as I do in California, I meet people who claim matter-of-factly to have done a variety of extraordinary things: they have left their bodies, traveled to past lives via hypnosis, channeled the spirits of deceased people, or communicated with spirit guides. I would once have considered them flakes or crackpots. (Sometimes, of course, I still do, if I feel they’ve lost their capacity for critical thinking and intellectual inquiry.) But over the years, I’ve encouraged myself to avoid this kind of peremptory dismissal.

After all, these people have had experiences that I haven’t had. I might want to interpret their experiences differently than they do, but I don’t have sufficient information for that: As my Eastern Orthodox friend said, “You weren’t there.” (And even if I had been there, it wouldn’t have made much difference, since most of the relevant information lies out of my reach, inside the experiencer’s body and mind.) So rather than dismiss the people who tell me such stories, I try to embrace their experiences. And sometimes I even learn from them.

(To be continued in part 4)

Posted April 20, 2022 by Mark S
Category: Communication

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Only Just

Most people presumably begin to think about morality and justice when some profound injury occurs, either to them or to someone they care about. For me, it started with something much more mundane: the Academy Awards.

Although I’ve always been a lover of classic movies, I never understood people’s emotional investment in the Academy Awards. Why does anybody care who wins? Unless you work in the higher levels of the film industry (in which case you’re probably not reading this blog), you’re not personally acquainted with any of the nominees. You have no financial stake in the studios that may benefit from the increased ticket sales that accompany a win. Most importantly, if you’ve seen any if the nominated films, you already know what you think of it, so the fact that it wins an Oscar — or doesn’t — isn’t going to affect your assessment.

At first I guessed that it was just a matter of validation. If you thought a film was great, it feels good to know that other people — particularly the presumed experts — share your opinion. If a film you hated wins the award, you have the satisfaction of being able to look down on those idiots in Hollywood who don’t recognize rubbish when they see it.

But that theory doesn’t go far enough. I began to notice that much of people’s agreement or disagreement with the Academy’s decisions isn’t based on comparative rankings of films and the people who make them. Instead, their reaction seems to have a moral component — that such-and-such an actor or director deserves the award, based on who they are and what they’ve done. In other words, it seems to be a matter not of taste, but of perceived fairness. In matters both significant and insignificant, we have a primal need to feel that justice has been done.

Justice, for me, has always been a tricky concept. When a human being has been killed, we call for justice to be done on their behalf. Strictly speaking, however, that’s not possible: The only real justice would be for the victim to be given back the life that was wrongly taken, but we don’t have that ability. So when people talk about justice in a case like this, what they usually mean is that the killer should be punished. But what does the punishment actually accomplish?

As I already mentioned, it doesn’t change the actual situation; the victim remains dead. Incarceration is unlikely to prevent the killer from killing more people, since most murders result from a unique set of circumstances that are unlikely to recur. Punishment of any sort may perhaps deter other people from killing, but the effectiveness of that deterrence is questionable — after all, this killer wasn’t deterred by the fact that others have been punished for similar crimes.

No, when we want to see a killer punished, it’s not about the punishment having any practical value. It’s about some innate feeling of rightness — the knowledge that a wrong has been done, and that wrong has to be compensated for somehow. The wrongdoer has to suffer in order to bring the moral universe back into balance.

It’s a sense that exists in all of us. As children, when we’re scolded or penalized for something we know we didn’t do, our immediate reaction is, “That’s not fair!” And the usual parental retort — “Life isn’t fair” — doesn’t fix the hurt. If life truly isn’t fair, then something is fundamentally wrong. It’s supposed to be fair.

Where does that innate sense of justice come from? Why is it so strong that we don’t take it to be merely an abstract concept, a way to interpret the world, but something essential about the world? I can’t think of anything else — with the possible exception of love — that so powerfully feels like it pre-exists us.

This is generally where religious faith enters the picture. For many people, the objective and essential rightness or wrongness of things is something established by God. As someone who doesn’t accept the existence of what I call the God Guy — the anthropomorphic figure who has ideas, feelings, and opinions about what each of us ought to be doing — I was always dismissive of this view. But the older I get, the more I have to believe that this sense of justice is not just something housed in our brains. If our sense of what’s fair is only a figment of our neurons, then there’s no such thing as justice; there are only ideas about justice.

Much about my upbringing left me with a dislike for — and often downright antipathy toward — anything religious. For reasons I’ve alluded to elsewhere, those feelings gradually faded, and I began to recognize that our existence incorporates more than can be sensed or analyzed. I can’t say that my spiritual side is very broad or deep, but the one thing that feels undeniable to me is that there is a sense of rightness woven into the universe. We can go with it or against it, just as we can swim with the current or against the current, but either way, it’s there. If you want to call that rightness God, I have no problem with that.

I’ve long admired the distinction the Quakers make between God’s will and self-will, and their view that the only way to give the former precedence over the latter is to cultivate a quiet mind. Learning to engage in a meditative practice has given me the chance to separate myself from my own self-importance, even for just a moment, and to feel which way that current of rightness flows. Any time I think I know what’s just — whether so-and-so should have won the Best Director award, or whether so-and-so ought to be locked up for life — I have to recognize that it’s likely just my ego talking, and that I need to open myself to the wisdom that lies outside of me. That recognition has value in itself, even if it usually doesn’t leave me with the answers that I crave.

Posted June 15, 2021 by Mark S
Category: Society

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Learning Backwards

When I was in third grade, my class was introduced to a strategy called SQR¹, which was supposed to improve our reading comprehension. It required that we engage in three steps when we encounter any new piece of reading material:

Skim. Briefly look through the text to get a sense of what it’s about. Get additional clues from the book jacket or in the table of contents.
Question. Come up with some questions that you think the text will be able to answer.
Read. Read the text with the aim of finding answers to your questions.

I found this prescription galling. First, nobody has any right to tell me how to think; what I do with my mind when I read is my own business. And second, why waste time with the first two steps when I can just read the damn book? I silently rebelled by refusing to engage in SQR whenever I wasn’t explicitly instructed to.

Around the same time, my father was encouraging me to go through the newspaper every day, from the front page to the last. “You don’t have to read the articles,” he said. “Just look at the headlines. Then if you come across an article that interests you, you can read it.” That seemed pointless. I already knew what I wanted to read in the paper: the comics and Ann Landers’s advice column. (I don’t know why a third grader would be so attached to reading Ann Landers, but I was. Perhaps it’s because she appeared so much more sensible than the other adults in my life.) I dismissed my father’s recommendation as just another thing that your parents tell you to do because it’s good for you.

The funny thing is that many years later, I realized that I was doing just those things that I’d rejected as a child: I was skimming and anticipating before reading a book, and I was diligently looking through the news headlines every day. And it wasn’t because I’d been taught to do those things when I was young; I’d long forgotten about SQR. It was because they were natural outgrowths of curiosity: If you’re interested in the subject of a book, you’ll naturally want to get some context before diving in. If you’re interested in the news, you’ll naturally want to glance at the headlines every day.

In other words, everything I was taught was backwards. Learning rote behaviors doesn’t create interest; instead, having interest leads to those behaviors. Once I realized that, lots of other inexplicable things made sense.

Take organized religion, for example. From the time I began my Jewish education as a young child, I was mystified by what was expected of me. Instead of being taught facts as I was in public school, I was being taught a set of unprovable beliefs in Hebrew school. I had friends who went to Catholic school and were being taught beliefs that were entirely different, yet they were supposed to accept them in the same unquestioning way that I was supposed to accept Jewish ideology. Why was that considered normal? Why would anyone subscribe to a religion that arbitrarily told them what to believe, instead of allowing themselves the freedom to believe whatever they wanted to?

It wasn’t until I was in my 20s, and was drawn into a Quaker community where I felt surprisingly at home, that I realized I had it backwards. People didn’t form religions in order to be told what to believe; instead, they had beliefs, and they found support by gathering with people who had beliefs similar to theirs. That was a perfectly natural and understandable thing. If there is pressure to believe what one’s family and community believe, that’s a corruption of religion, not inherent in the idea of religion itself.

I was reminded of the backwards nature of our attitude toward religion after my younger sister died a few years ago. Although she had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer a year earlier, her actual passing was difficult to accept, and I remained in a state of shock. My wife asked me whether I wanted to sit shiva, and I said no. Sitting shiva is a Jewish tradition in which, after the death of a family member, the remaining members of the immediate family gather together for a week to support each other in mourning. (“Shiva” is the Hebrew word for seven, referring to seven days.) People who are sitting shiva don’t do any work, don’t prepare meals, and don’t leave the house; instead, friends come by with food and condolences.

I objected to sitting shiva because, as has been true since childhood, I resist following Jewish traditions simply because I’m supposed to. “If you don’t want to sit shiva,” Debra asked, “what would help you feel better?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t want to do anything. I think I just want to stay home, with you. If friends want to come by, that would be nice.” I began to realize what I was saying. “And maybe they can bring food.” We both laughed. Clearly, sitting shiva wasn’t needed because it was a tradition; it was a tradition that came about to fill a need. It was yet another thing I’d learned backwards.

Posted April 1, 2021 by Mark S
Category: Education

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Tag: religion

Holy Ravioli

Atmosphere (3)

Only Just

Learning Backwards

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