In the same routine every Sunday morning, my mother would pack my sister and I off to bible class. We ambled down the streets of an airbase town in Ontario to a clapboard church, where we sat at the feet of a young teacher who read us incredible tales from a big black brick of a book.
I enjoyed Sunday school. As a six-year old kid, I was particularly impressed with the story of Samson, who “smote” a thousand Philistines with the jawbone of an ass. Total superhero stuff. But the tale of Noah’s Ark had me doubting that big black book. Two of every animal on one ship? Wouldn’t the pair of lions eat the pair of sheep mid-voyage, for starters? As for Adam and Eve, Genesis lost me at the talking snake. Ain’t no way that ever happened, I decided.
I guess you could say my habit of skepticism toward authoritative adult statements of truth started early.
(Many years later, I learned my parents didn’t send my sister and I off to Sunday school for our betterment - I never detected a particle of religious belief in either of them - but so they could have their “alone time.”)
Not dead, but on a ventilator
There’s an old battlefield saying, “there are no atheists in foxholes.” Though I’ve never been in a foxhole myself, I can imagine there’s something about bullets whizzing by that wonderfully concentrates the mind. And encourages a position of religious faith.
If things get really heavy, the human psyche can veer from monotheistic to maternal. When the writer Arthur Koestler was under death sentence in a Seville prison cell during the Spanish Civil War, he sometimes heard prisoners outside his cell crying ‘madre, madre’ as they were marched off to be shot. And echoing this - possibly the most tragic anecdote I’ve ever heard - young men in and outside the trenches of World War I were often heard crying out for their mothers in their final moments.
Such extreme situations are difficult for comfortable, educated westerners to conceive. We Canadians have generally had it pretty comfy over the past seventy years, at least in terms of immediate physical threats. We don’t dig into the ground to fight our enemies; we dig online to find them, while making mountains out of microaggression molehills.
Faith is contraindicated by comfort, so we don’t have the same pressing need for religious belief as our ancestors. Statistics reveal a declining pattern of Christian church attendance for decades. God may not be dead, but he’s certainly on a ventilator - if we measure his health by team membership.
The metaphysics of healing
Obviously, I’m not one for a literal interpretation of the Bible or any other religious texts. However, I don’t have the luxury of certainty expressed by top-flight, atheistic eggheads like Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett. Like most secular thinkers, they dismiss organized religion as a dangerous, irrational force casting a shadow across human history.
Yes, organized religion has a persistent tendency to descend into hatred, division, and cosmic judgement. Most of us get that.
A one-sided view of religious historical horrors makes for a simpler narrative, but it’s complicated by the messy fact that religious faith has survival value, as noted by the writer Chip Brown in his 2000 book, Afterwards You’re a Genius: Faith, Medicine, and the Metaphysics of Healing.
Patients with religious faith were three times more likely to survive open-heart surgery. They were discharged more quickly from the hospital than nonreligious patients by a factor of twenty percent. Those recovering from hip fractures could walk farther and were less depressed when they got out of the hospital than their nonreligious peers. Hospital stays for all illnesses were nearly two and a half times longer for elderly patients without religious affiliations. People who attended church or synagogue services once a week had stronger immune systems, lower diastolic blood pressures, lower overall mortality rates. Mormons in America had half the cancer rate of the general public. Seventh Day Adventists in the Netherlands lived seven years longer than their fellow citizens. Church attendance was strongly correlated with levels of the biological agent interleukin. A lack of religious affiliation is one of the key predictors for alcoholism.
How much of this health benefit and mortality reduction is due to religious faith itself, the community it often provides, or the putative Source it appeals to? Probably tricky to control for that in scientific studies.
In any case, there’s also the matter of social good created by religious faith. Would the Reverend Martin Luther King have fought so valiantly for civil rights, and rallied so bravely against the US war machine - drawing millions of black churchgoers and white fellow travelers in his wake - were he not a hardcore believer in God? Would the Hindu leader Gandhi have fought for Indian independence, at risk to his own life, without faith of his own? (When Gandhi was asked why he continually sacrificed himself for India, he replied, “I do this for myself alone. When we serve others we serve ourselves. The Upanishads call this ‘God feeding God.’”)
It’s probably as hopeless to seek a rational foundation for faith as it is to find a rational wrecking ball for it. Theologians from St. Aquinas onward have tried the prove the existence of God through logical propositions, without much success. (Consider St. Augustine’s unintentionally funny response when asked what God doing before he created the universe: “creating Hell for those who ask such questions.”) At other end of the spectrum, secular thinkers like Daniel Dennett have struggled with the survival of religious belief against the apparent grain of cultural if not biological evolution.
Either way, applying reason to faith strikes me as like sticking a fudge sundae into a mass spectrometer: the device can reduce the sundae to its elements, but the flavour remains outside its scope. (That said, I have a scientist friend with a clever concept about how the human habit of reading intentionality in nature can be scaled up to imagined deities. But that’s too much to go into here.)
My point here is that it doesn’t do much good to dismiss all religious believers as deluded fools, and their beliefs as dangerous delusions, when the social and physical health upside go ignored. As for the supposed intellectual superiority of atheists, I believe they commit the same category error as fundamentalists, by making absolutist claims about metaphysical matters they can show no objective proof for. You can no more prove to others the existence of a supreme being than you can prove to others his/her/it’s nonexistence.
As for agnostics, there’s one thing you can say in their favour. You’ll never see them appear in pairs on your doorstep, clutching pamphlets and saying, “we’d like to talk to you about something we’re not at all sure about.”
Plus, no one ever went to war over “The Indefinable Whatever.” Go, Team Agnostic!
Sewing machine legs
In Part 2 I wrote about the mass destruction from the tsunami in Southeast Asia on December 26, 2004. A friend of mine was on a beach in Thailand near that time. He started feeling “super anxious” for no apparent reason. A friend offered to drive him back to their resort, but that wasn’t enough: my friend felt compelled to leave the country itself. Eric (not his real name) immediately caught a flight to Bangkok and then to Rangoon. There he faced the unnerving prospect of a 12 hour layover. Luckily, a connecting flight suddenly came up. The tsunami struck while he was in the air.
“I didn't put two-and-two together until I was in India,” he told me. “I remember seeing this devastation on TV.” Eric had no voice in his head directing him to safety; just a gut-level feeling of an immediate need to make himself scarce. It was hours before the tsunami struck, so it seems very unlikely like he sensed some subtle changes in the environment.
So where do such promptings come from? His experience may or may have nothing to do with any supreme being - I doubt it does - but stories such as his suggest there are aspects of the human psyche that can’t be shoehorned into a materialist scientific paradigm.
In his book, Afterwards You’re a Genius, Chip Brown struggles to reconcile his persona of a cynical, joking journalist with a newfound identity as a gumshoe reporter tracking clues to ontological mysteries. Toward the end of the book, relates a rock-climbing expedition that goes sideways when he gets stuck on a tricky section. It’s a ‘no atheists in a foxhole’ situation for the author:
My legs began to tremble, shaking violently. Sewing machine legs, they called it. Sweat ran into my eyes. The rope trailed off to my right, not directly above me; if I fell, I wouldn't slide a foot or two, I would pendulum across the cliff, spinning and careening off the rock, and I would be in even worse circumstances, stranded in a blank section with nothing to grab on to... I had to move past the bulge even though I didn't know what holds might lie around the bend. I had to move with only the hope something would be there. My hands were soaked, my breath shallow. I crouched at the side of the outcrop and then levered myself up onto the bulge. No turning back now. But I saw with panic that my prayers were not answered. There was nothing to hold on to. I couldn't go forward or back, I could only hold on where I was, and within seconds I felt the last of my strength ebbing.
I was lost. God was deaf. I had nothing to summon. No energy. No will. Nothing that could deliver me from this impasse high on a plunging wall in the mountains of New Hampshire. It was only the terror of falling - of still greater calamity - that kept me hanging on . . , And then the strangest thing happened: I saw myself move. On the strength of some unknown initiative, I watched as I moved - as I was moved. Watched as if from above my body. One trembling leg flailed out to the right and found a purchase. And then my exhausted fingers crept across the rock face to some hitherto-unseen fleck of stone and grasped it, and then I saw my clown bulk miraculously shifting to the right, around the burl of rock. I was not the conscious agent of these actions. I was beside myself and being moved, like a zombie possessed by some other sort of agency, some hidden force or will that had drawn on reserves could not invoke but could only bear witness to - could only hail in a chorus of hallelujahs issuing from my throat at the instant of my extrication. Here was Fate's Pawn ready to shout praise to something! Something had delivered me! Something had spared me from the abyss. But what, exactly? What had happened? Whose bidding had I done? There was something I should believe in, and to this day I'm not sure what it is.
I imagine a neuropsychologist might explain the author’s experience as a state of dissociation, with the observing consciousness sidelined by some kind of higher (or lower) somatic processing. Or some other convincing explanation. Yet many of us have had personal experiences that defy our understanding, whether they are seemingly clairvoyant like my friend’s in Thailand, or something even odder. Some of us hold these experiences close to our hearts, feeling they might be profaned - or at least tarnished - in the telling.
I’ll share one of mine.
Electric feel
I mentioned my early skepticism of biblical tales. As a result, I never learned to put a name to some of my stranger childhood experiences.
These occurred somewhere between the ages of eight and twelve. It could be a sunny or cloudy day, but in any case I’d be alone walking through the woods near my home when I would feel an occasional impulse to put my hands out. When I did, an electric sensation would flow into my hands and through my body, a feeling so utterly sweet and pure the best word to describe it is holy. It was subtle but powerful, similar to goosebumps but experienced throughout the body rather than just on the surface of the skin.
As a kid, I didn’t know if it was from “God” or exactly what it was. Perhaps I knew well enough not to overthink something so primary and powerful, that felt like pure refined love.
This experience ceased well before I reached my teens. Yet when hiking a few years back n the Gulf Islands, I felt a small impulse to put my hands out. When I did, that ancient but timeless sensation returned for the first time in a half century. Weaker than I remembered, but still the same ‘frequency’ - like a staticky signal from a distant radio station where the call letters are still recognizable.
In the Christian tradition there’s something called “gratuitous graces.” These are circumstances of peculiar beneficence that “are neither necessary nor sufficient for salvation.” In my case, my experiences certainly felt like gifts from above.
Was this generated by my unconscious mind, an Overself, or some discarnate entity, to make a lonely kid from a dysfunctional family feel better? This only ever happened when I was out it the woods, so it makes more sense to me to peg the source as nature itself. And I wouldn’t be surprised if there are great numbers of people who’ve had experiences similar to mine, as children or adults, but don’t talk much about them.
I’m sure some smart skeptic like Richard Dawkins could assure me that my experiences were simply the result of unusual brain activity. Perhaps bit more serotonin in the gray matter, or a bit more dopamine in the white matter. I don’t doubt there might have been some interesting neurological signature attached to my tingly transport, or that of my friend’s seeming clairvoyance, or Brown’s rocky salvation. I’m a huge fan of science and its ability to explain the world, but it seems to me that reducing experiences such as these to the traffic of ions across neural channels is as reductionistic as pegging love as nothing more than a gradient of oxytocin.
There’s explaining and then there’s explaining away - which I find to be a particular talent of journalists who channel basic science badly. Thankfully, I’ve never been particularly good at the habit of what Arthur Koestler called “bathwaterism,” his portmanteau for tossing the baby out with the bathwater.
My mystically tingly childhood experiences are proof of precisely nothing. The plural of anecdote is not data, and all that. But these and other personal experiences have convinced me, like Chip Brown, that there is something I should believe in… I’m just not sure what it is.
As the writer Robert Anton Wilson put it, “I don’t believe anything, but I have many suspicions.” Ultimately, I’m with those who think of life less as a problem to be solved than a mystery to be lived. But more about some suspicions of mine in the next installment.
There is no way I could describe the experience on this post but if you would like to meet one day for coffee, I could tell you about two, perhaps three experiences I have had regarding my Guardian Angel. One of these experiences was in 2020 when I completely rebuked the protection my Guardian Angel was offering with disastrous results leaving with me with a permanent reminder to pay closer attention to what my Guardian Angel is attempting do on my behalf. You mentioned the "over-self " but this is only one way of viewing what this energy might be.
What can I add to this? Only that you have managed to compress a huge topic into a few pages and done it with grace. Grace. That is a word that certainly comes into this. Words are inadequate at describing the implicit, which what a sense of the divine actually is. We all struggle to express it, and you have done a great job. Looking forward to to more...