My blog post on Atheist Spirituality.
Quote:
Nope that is not a typo in the title of this blog post, nor is it an oxymoron. It is typical to assume that being "spiritual" means one believes in supernatural forces and deities; I consider such assumptions to be utter nonsense. It is nonsense that stems from what I think is a baseless dualistic distinction between "spirit" and "mere matter" that permeates Western thought. This dualistic assumption, which is so much a part of Western thought that it goes unquestioned by very educated people and even by many of my fellow atheists, in my opinion leads to the physical world, in all it's wonderfulness and beauty, to be belittled and dismissed as "mere matter." This dualistic belittling of the physical world is obvious in the word "mundane," which comes from a Latin word meaning "The World," is used to refer to something "ordinary." This dismissal of the physical world as being "mere matter" is a source of a lot of the rhetoric New Age supernaturalists and the theologians of the great religions use to attack what they label "scientism," "scientific fundamentalism," "soulless materialism," "mechanistic reductionism," and other loaded terms for philosophical naturalism, which is the philosophical concept that the physical world is all that exists and that there are no supernatural realms and entities.
Many claim that they "know" God and/or supernatural realms because of their own personal experiences of so-called "mystical" states. Not that I think these states don't exist, I have experienced them myself, the sense of awe, wonder, bliss, union, the whole thing. I just don't believe that these states are the result of supernatural things nor are they visions of the divine. I consider these "mystical" states to simply be altered states of consciousness, purely physical processes in the brain. Even though these states are "merely" effects of the brain that, in my opinion, doesn't mean they are not important, nor does it mean that these states are "mere delusions." These altered states of consciousness temporarily free our minds from the prison that is language-based brain processes that give us a sense of self and thus bring us into an ego-less mental state that allows us to see that we are parts of existance, we are not separate from it; we are parts of the Universe observing Itself, one could say. A good example of this is the case of a brain researcher who had a series of mystical experiences during a stroke. People only think that these wonderful and enlightening experiences are supernatural only because they are conditioned by their own religion beliefs to see them that way.
Mystics often describe the sense of unity and mystery experienced during altered states of consciousness as "The Absolute," "The One," The All," etc. and label this as "union with God." My problem with this is that this use of the term "God" stretches the term so much that it makes the term useless. Pantheistic theologies that conceive of the Cosmos and God as the same thing fall into the same problem. Such notions are very far removed from the concept of God as a supernatural man in the sky that performs miracles and punishes the wicked that most people believe in. The average person's notion of God is essentially only slightly removed from primitive superstition, the theologians' conceptualizations are irrelevant abstractions. Existence is wonderful in itself, using the term "God" to describe the wonder, awe, beauty, and mystery of existence and being is merely the use of an anthropomorphic and anthropocentric superstition based on a false dualistic world view. The physical world is not "mere" matter, it is The Absolute, The One, The All, The Ultimate Reality we are all a part of, and that, in my opinion, is far more beautiful and wonderful then any supernatural belief.
20 Apr 2008, 12:27 pm
