Paranormalia

Religion at Easter

Recently I've found myself thinking as much about religion as about psi. I'm aware that the two aren't necessarily related, and that some people take survival of consciousness seriously without believing in God. That said, the logic is that paranormal and religious experience are closely linked - most obviously in mystical and near-death experiences. And considering how much documented data there is about these and other such things it interests me that the spiritualism/New Age take on religion it informs is so little known or discussed.

I notice that especially now at Easter, a time there's so much religious commentary about. These days, post Dawkins, a lot of it comes from atheists.  First up is Roland White, who writes jokey columns in the Sunday Times. Cornered by his daughter with the God question he panicked - as a disbeliever, what on earth was he to say? His problem, he explained, is that nobody could ever give him a convincing argument for the existence of God?

The best we're usually offered is that there is some powerful force that guides us, a force beyond human comprehension. We cannot discover it, we must simply have faith. Add the words "the truth is out there" and you have the theology of The X Files. I'm sorry to say this at Easter, but the older I get, the more I think Richard Dawkins might be on to something. How depressing is that?

White cited a recent discussion between the Archbishop of Canterbury and John Humphrys, the acerbic broadcaster who it seems lost the last vestige of religious belief after the mass murders of children in the Russian town of Beslan. The archbishop, trying to win him back, argued as follows:  'God is the agency that's at work in everything and has set up the world in such a way that not only is evil possible, but moments are also possible where something breaks through of healing, or miracle. Where and when it breaks through might be guided by the power of prayer.' White comments: 'I don't think it persuaded Humphrys, and it certainly didn't convince me.'

White was quite funny about Vincent Nichols, the new Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, who last week accused the football authorities of showing disdain for Christians by holding Premier League matches on Easter Sunday. Why should the Godless hordes sit around twiddling their thumbs during a religious festival that means nothing to them? Would it be OK if they kicked a ball around in the park with sweaters for goalposts? What about a slightly more formal amateur level match?  A fourth division event? How far up the footballing hierarchy before the archbishop detects disdain?

This is light, knockabout stuff. But the shadow of Richard Dawkins looms large. Over to the Guardian, where Madeleine Bunting discerns a growing distaste among thinking folk for 'the polemics of the New Atheist debate and its foghorn volume'.

Just this week, [author] AN Wilson announces in a thoughtful cover article for the New Statesman that he has apostated, abandoning his fellow atheists. Or take another example: in the Third Way, a Christian magazine, the poet Andrew Motion reflects wistfully, "I don't believe in God - though I wish I did, and I can't stop thinking about it so who knows what might happen one day?" Wilson and Motion talk of uncertainty, doubt and faith in terms that are probably far more familiar to the vast majority of the British - many of whom still describe themselves as believing in God, whatever they mean by that - than the certitudes used by Dawkins. New Atheism may come to be regarded as winning a battle but losing the war.

Bunting speaks of atheists' 'egotism and arrogance'. She sees the New Atheists mirroring a particular strain of fundamentalist Christianity with no knowledge of the vast variety of other forms of religious faith, and sharing 'the inner glow of complete certainty'. She cites the historian of religion Karen Armstrong, who argues that it's a mistake to see religion as a matter of belief in a set of propositions, when it's more about doing, acting with compassion.

She also approves of the philosopher and writer Alain de Botton, who calls himself an atheist but runs a quasi-religion School of Life, complete with Sunday sermons and 'pilgrimages' to fill the widespread longing for wisdom and insight. "Even if you're an atheist, there are a huge number of insights in religion," he says. "We're in danger of throwing the baby out with the bathwater."

That brought a come-back, also in the Guardian, from non-believing philosopher Julian Baggini, who pointed out that atheists are increasingly seen as shrill, bishop-bashing fanatics who are tone deaf to the spiritual. There's no point them complaining about this caricature, he added; if they publish books with titles like The God Delusion and God is Not Great then obviously they are going to be seen as anti-religious zealots.

Baggini's main point is that this extremism leaves the field free for people like Bunting who insist that religion is not to be taken literally, and that its creeds are not factual descriptions of the real world. This gets him going:

The idea that it is a modern distortion to think of religious beliefs as being factually true is manifest nonsense. If people thought their tenets of faith were metaphors, why did they torture or kill people who disagreed with them. Did doctrinal differences about Christ's divinity have no role in Rome's split from the Orthodox church? If literal truth is not what matters, why is it so hard to find a practising Muslim who's prepared to say that the Angle Gabriel didn't really dictate the Qur'an to the prophet?

(If it had come a few days earlier, the news that Mel Gibson and his wife are splitting up would have reminded the atheists of a perfect example of this kind of mind-boggling literalism. Gibson, a sort of ultra-traditionalist Catholic as I recall, was reported as saying that while he would make eternal salvation, his wife would not because she was a Protestant,  even though he considered her to be 'saintly' and it was rather unfair.)

Like many atheists, Baggini seems chiefly offended by the traditionalist extremists, but also derides the 'fluffy brigade', with their 'doctrine-lite' faith, whose idea of religion corresponds not to the reality, as expressed by traditionalist zealots, but to what they would like it to be. He doesn't care if people want to retain a sense of being religious, he says, as long as what they believe stands up to intellectual scrutiny.

As I say, in all this babble of voices there's very almost no reference to a body of research which in many ways offers new insights and possibilities, and offers tentative answers to the questions that stymie so many people.  Atheists always say: where's the evidence? There is no evidence. Go away.  Well, for me there is evidence: the fact that humans have psychic and religious experiences. Atheists of course are sceptics and think this experience is based on fraud, misperception, hallucination and wishful thinking. But most of them know little or nothing about it, and are just following the intellectual consensus, fed in the media by folk like Randi, Wiseman and Blackmore.

Some people can filter it out, but the fact is, these experiences and perceptions of many different kinds - apparitions and poltergeists, automatic writing, ouija board and other mediumistic communication, ESP, out-of-body and near-death experiences, and children's memories of past lives, and others - in their various ways all provide a detailed, multi-faceted picture of survival of death. Moreover, an abundance of channelled communications provide a very detailed picture of what kind of experiences may await us in the post-mortem state. The very least one can say is that humans are in some way subjecting themselves to an extraordinarily detailed and convincing illusion that they are psychic and immortal beings. If the power of the illusion isn't generally recognised, that's surely because there's a sort of taboo on taking psychical research seriously, so relatively few people know about it.

The point is, none of this would have to be proven beyond doubt - and of course it isn't - to be a part of the debate. Take the Beslan children that so upset Humphrys, the implausibly cruel God argument. The abundant indications that some children, in some circumstances, have memories of having lived before, offers some support - and some people would say, quite powerful support - of the Hindu and Buddhist claim that humans live more than once, and quite possibly many many times, a claim backed up by channelled communications and also in the data about the visions brought on by LSD and other hallucinogens. This offers a quite different idea of religion, of the world as essentially a kind of classroom, a learning experience, in which cruelty and suffering are a means, among many,  by which we mature into fully spiritual beings. Of course, this raises other objections, like why should that be necessary, and might be seen as equally repugnant as a capricious God. But it's much more logical, and it's backed by evidence - of a kind. 

Nor is it just about psychism and the paranormal. I've just been having another go at Irreducible Mind, and I'm astonished by the wealth of examples in it - relatively few of them from psychical research - that imply that the conventional view of consciousness, as a product solely of brain processes, is untenable and that the brain is much better conceived in terms of a device that transmits or filters some external factor. That factor doesn't have to be a soul, as traditionally conceived, but it seriously weakens one of the pillars of atheism, that the mind dies with the brain.

So there's plenty of food for thought here, and it would take the debate to a different level. Where I sort of sympathise with Baggini is his puzzlement as to what the basis of the 'fluffy doctrine-lite' religion actually consists of. What do people like Bunting actually believe? Is it a sort of tailored down version of Christianity, a nice friendly religion based on compassion and tolerance and quietly ignoring all the difficult and implausible bits. In that case how do they justify it? Where does it come from? Also, why don't they come out and condemn the excesses, cruelties and stupidities of the traditionalist zealots, instead of implying that that's not important or that it's a misrepresentation of religion by atheists?

Actually, I think Bunting is tapping into a kind of sympathetic agnosticism which I guess probably is pretty widespread in Britain and Europe and other parts of the developed world (I don't know about the US, which seems to be a somewhat different case). I've noticed - Bel Mooney's book Devout Sceptics based on a radio series, is a good example - that when famous folk are asked for their religious views they fiddle about on the margins of belief, rather like Andrew Motion, sometimes wanting to believe, but not really finding the justification for it.

I might well feel like this too if I hadn't happened to be curious about near-death experiences and the like, and spent some time getting to grips with it. I'm absolutely with the atheists on this one: there's no point in believing something without evidence. It's academic now, but I doubt whether the mere feeling that 'there is some powerful force that guides us, a force beyond human comprehension' would ever have made me religious, even vaguely and fluffily. I just wish I could collar all these people and say, stop wasting your time on anxious, puzzled speculation, and get reading. Then we can start to have a real conversation.

Susan Blackmore on Prayer

Caroline Petrie, a nurse in Weston-Super-Mare, has been suspended for offering to say a prayer for the recovery of an elderly care home resident. The patient complained to the health trust, and next thing, Petrie was being reprimanded by the trust manager, who said she would not work again until the 'incident' had been investigated. This happened before Christmas, and Petrie is to learn her fate next week.

Small minded bureacratese in public institutions is a fact of life, but I can't ever recall hearing anything quite so sad and nonsensical. Couldn't the patient just have just said, 'Sorry dear, I don't believe in any of that'. If you don't believe in God what possible harm can it do? Why make a big deal?  (As the presenter Matthew Bannister gently suggested.)

Of course it's no fun being harangued by a God botherer, especially if you can't escape, and if Petrie had been badgering the woman then I could sort of understand. But she insists she didn't, and she must surely have known that would be overstepping the mark in a professional situation. It's something she often does, she says, and patients are 'delighted'.

By chance, just as I was digesting this from the newspaper it I heard the subject come up on my wife's radio. A woman was forcefully defending the Trust, arguing that Petrie's action had been 'inappropriate' - it would be bad enough if the woman had been in good health, but being poorly, to be in a situation like that would set her pulse racing and make her scared and uncomfortable.

The horror of it! The speaker turned out to be arch-skeptic Susan Blackmore, and I have to say, I hadn't realised she was so militantly atheist: I thought her objections to religion were more a matter of scientific incompatibility than because it's inherently objectionable. But Blackmore sounded genuinely outraged that anyone should be exposed to the threat of having a prayer said for her. I thought atheism was about disbelieving in God as a pointless superstition, not as something that makes the blood run cold.

Psi skeptics often imply, and some say straight out, that parapsychologists are religious nutters who chase after stories of telepathy and near-death experiences and the like because they want to prove the existence of God and the immortal human soul. That's nonsense, of course, and it's impossible to imagine a serious psi investigator like Rupert Sheldrake or Ian Stevenson or Dean Radin making this kind of intervention on a religious matter. Blackmore's outburst underlines what I've long suspected, that between parapsychologists and their critics, it's the latter who are more likely to be motivated by quasi-religious feeling.

Religion and Terror

One of the big puzzles about Islamic terror is the idea that the truly wicked things the terrorists do might be somehow commanded by God. Like most people (I hope) I've struggled to understand how exposure to Islamic teaching could make a person think it's a good idea to go and blow up a train full of commuters. It seems that for certain minds, the infidels are so excluded from God's love that the rules are relaxed and they can do what they like with them, even things that they themselves are expressly commanded not to do. 

The dissonance this has created since September 2001 is fierce, and underlies tracts such as Sam Harris's The End of Faith. I had mixed feelings about the book when it came out.  I like a good polemic - it's passionately written, and less predictably doctrinaire than Richard Dawkins, for instance. I was also impressed, and also slightly surprised, by his openness to psi phenomena - he has read Radin and Sheldrake, and thinks that Stevenson's work may even suggest evidence for reincarnation. He would like to see mystical experiences explored with an open mind, while 'shedding the provincialism and dogmatism of our religious traditions in favor of free and rigorous enquiry.' (p. 41)

But I was deeply sceptical about his thesis that, because the Koran contains passages that urge violent acts, the rise of Islam means we're doomed. My impression is that many if not most devout Muslims ignore the objectionable bits in the Koran just as most Christians sensibly overlook the Old Testament demands for people who work on Sundays to be put to death. People who are on a spiritual path respond to the best in religious teaching, because it resonates with the best in themselves. The other stuff just gets filtered out. That may not make much sense to a logical mind like Harris's, but in practice it's the way most humans are - thank God.

So I was fascinated by the findings published today by MI5 about the relationship between religion and terror. The spooks have apparently made in-depth studies of several hundred individuals known to be involved in, or associated with, religiously inspired violence in Britain.  And guess what? They aren't really religious at all, in any meaningful sense. Far from being zealots, the study says that British Islamic terrorists don't practise their faith regularly. Many are not literate in their religion, and should be considered novices at best. Very few have strongly religious backgrounds  and tend more often to be recent converts. Some even take drugs, drink alcohol and visit prostitutes, ignoring the Koranic proscriptions.

Interestingly, the promise of an afterlife as a spur to suicide attacks doesn't seem that significant either. There's no sense that would-be suicide bombers are strongly attracted to the idea of virgins in paradise - most who are over 30 have steady relationships and children - so the stereotype of the sexually frustrated young man up for an eternity of shagging is quite wrong, although the report says some may find psychological security in a belief in future rewards. Nor are the terrorist groups at all picky about who they recruit. The report says they are remarkably tolerant of individuals with serious criminal histories, even if they continue to be involved in drug trafficking, assault and even rape.

From MI5's point of view, the findings aren't terribly helpful. It seems the terrorists are not obviously mad or bad, and can come from any ethnic group or race, and any level of education, which means there is little that makes them stand out from the crowd and easier to catch.

I suppose one should be concerned by that, but the report leaves me personally feeling a bit reassured. Deep down I've never really accepted that a person who by any conventional measure is religious - says prayers, attends services, keeps God's commandments, and so on - could be a cruel fanatic bent on creating orphans and widows.  Of course this only applies to Brits, and a different dynamic may apply in Muslim countries. But it's good to know that the link between religion and terror is perhaps not as strong as we've been led to think.