Welcome to From Insults to Respect. Let’s start off this post with a brief tale that illustrates some of the strong feelings that come about when religion is discussed:

 A rabbi and atheist are heatedly arguing over whether or not god truly exists. After a whole hour of this, finally the rabbi cries out in a rage, “How can you be so absolutely certain that there is no god!?”

“Hey,” cries the atheist, “a person has to believe in something!”

Neither of these two characters in this tale respects the position of the other. It illustrates my experience of regularly meeting people who insult others with whom they disagree on religious matters.

Isaac Bashevis Singer

At times, I sympathize with some of these expressed feelings. I remember reading a short story by Isaac Bashevis Singer titled “Yentl the Yeshiva Boy.” It tells us about a girl named Yentl who wants to enter a school to learn about a subject that greatly interests her, but according to the leaders of her Jewish community she is excluded solely because she is a woman. That seems unfair to me.

Then I learned about Malala Yousafzai and two other young female students who, on 9 October 2012, were shot by people who, based on their religious convictions, believed girls should not go to school. And more recently, in 2022, I read of a religiously motivated man stabbing novelist Salman Rushdie because Rushdie had written a story that included what some viewed as an irreverent depiction of Muhammad.

Salman Rushdie

When I learn about these types of stories, I do get an instant negative reaction about religion. But my mind quickly turns to the fact that the people I personally know do not condone violence against anyone because of their religious or non-religious convictions.

In thinking deeply about these issues, my mind always drifts to the ideas of William James, the esteemed Harvard professor of psychology and philosophy, and author of The Varieties of Religious Experience.

William James on Religion

James lived from 1842 to 1910, and throughout his lifetime faced some extremely challenging ideas about this topic. To begin with, his father, was a deeply religious person. Though James frequently expressed a great admiration for his dad, he, himself, had just the slightest connection to religious feelings. He expressed this connection in a letter to James Henry Leuba on April 17, 1904:

My personal position is simple. I have no living sense of commerce with a God. I envy those who have, for I know the addition of such a sense would help me immensely. The divine, for my active life, is limited to abstract concepts, which, as ideals, interest, and determine me, but do so faintly, in comparison, with what a feeling of God might affect, if I had one. It is largely a question of intensity, but differences of intensity may make one whole center of energy shift. Now, although I am so devoid of religious feelings in the director and stronger sense, yet there is something in me, which makes response when I hear utterances made from that lead by others. I recognize the deeper voice. Something tells me, “thither lies truth”– and I am sure it is not all theistic habits and prejudice of infancy. Those are Christian; and I have grown so out of Christianity that entanglement therewith on the part of a mystical utterance has to be abstracted from and overcome, before I can listen. Call this, if you like, my mystical germ. It is a very common germ. It creates the rank and file of believers. As it withstands in my case, so will withstand in most cases, all purely atheistic criticism, but interpretive criticism (not of the mere “hysteria” and “nerves” order) it can energetically combine with. Your criticism seems to amount to a pure non possumus [inability]: “Mystical deliverances must be infallible revelations in every particular, or nothing. Therefore, they are nothing, for anyone else their owner.” Why may they not be something, although not everything?

Your only consistent position, it strikes me, would be a dogmatic atheistic naturalism; and, without any mystical germs in us, that, I believe, is where we all should unhesitatingly be today.

Once allow the mystical germ to influence our beliefs, and I believe that we are in my position. Of course, the “subliminal” theory is an inessential hypothesis, and the question of pluralism or monism is equally inessential.

I am letting loose a deluge on you!… but I had to restate my position more clearly. Yours truly,

Wm. James

Meanwhile, many of the experts in his field believed those who were religious were suffering from a pathological condition. In his book, “The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study In Human Nature,” he responded by calling this pathologizing “medical materialism” and critiquing its view as follows.

Medical materialism seems indeed a good appellation for the too simple-minded system of thought which we are considering. Medical materialism finishes up Saint Paul by calling his vision on the road to Damascus a discharging lesion of the occipital cortex, he being an epileptic. It snuffs out Saint Teresa as an hysteric, Saint Francis of Assisi as an hereditary degenerate. George Fox’s discontent with the shams of his age, and his pining for spiritual veracity, it treats as a symptom of a disordered colon. Carlyle’s organ-tones of misery it accounts for by a gastro-duodenal catarrh. All such mental overtensions, it says, are, when you come to the bottom of the matter, mere affairs of diathesis (auto-intoxications most probably), due to the perverted action of various glands which physiology will yet discover.

James goes on from here to point out that it is true, of course, that psychology has found that there are definite psycho-physical connections that “hold good”. Psychology, therefore, assumes as a convenient hypothesis that the dependence of mental states on bodily conditions must be thoroughgoing and complete. If we adopt the assumption, then of course what medical materialism insists on must be true in a general way, if not every detail…. But now, I ask you, how can such an existential account of facts of mental history decide in one way or another on their spiritual significance? According to the general postulate of psychology just referred to, there is not a single one of our states of mind, high or low, healthy or morbid, that has not some organic process as its condition. Scientific theories are organically conditioned just as much as religious emotions are; and if we only knew the facts intimately enough, we should doubtless see “the liver” determining the dicta of the sturdy atheist as decisively as it does those of the Methodist under conviction anxious about his soul. When it alters one way the blood that percolates it, we get the Methodist, when in another way, we get the atheist form of mind. So of all our raptures and our drynesses, our longings and pantings, our questions and beliefs. They are equally organically founded, be they religious or of non-religious content.

James points out that in the natural sciences and industrial arts it never occurs to anyone to refute opinions by putting down their authors’ neurological constitutions. Value is determined by “judgments based on our own immediate feelings primarily; and secondarily on what we can ascertain of their experiential relations to our moral needs and to the rest of what we hold as true.” All states of mind are related in extremely complex ways to neural functions.The significance of each state of mind must be tested, not by its neurological origins, but by the value of its fruits. When the term “pathological” is applied to an experience, it wrongly implies a neutral science classification.

At another point in his career, James, wrote an an essay in response to philosopher Thomas Huxley and other great champions of the scientific method who were criticizing religious beliefs. James titled his essay, “The Will to Believe.”  There he wrote that it was designed to be a “justification of faith, a defense of our right to adopt a believing attitude in religious matters, in spite of the fact that our merely logical intellect may not have been coerced.” It goes on to say,

Our nonintellectual nature does influence our convictions. Once we recognize this, we have a duty “to ask whether it be simply reprehensible and pathological, or whether, on the contrary, we must treat it as a normal element in making up our minds.

Discussion

Jeff Rubin, PhD

It is perfectly natural that folks vary in the degree that some aspect of life interests them, When I was growing up, I never once felt a call to become an accountant. Some people chose voluntarily to enter into that career, and love it. Some people have no motivation to learn to play a musical instrument. I was motivated to learn the piano and guitar, but just devoted myself to playing several times per week for 15 to 30 minutes. Others devote enough time to playing so they achieve a professional level. They go on from there to play in a band for two or more hours nightly and love it.

William James’s father valued his religious sentiment, invited similar interested folks to his home for long evenings of discussions about religious experiences. As we have seen, for Professor James, his religious feelings were of a far less intensity. “The divine, for my active life, is limited to abstract concepts, which, as ideals, interest, and determine me, but do so faintly, in comparison, with what a feeling of God might affect, if I had one.”

My own religious feelings are much more in line with Professor James’s than his father’s. Nevertheless, I don’t disrespect those folks who are more or less religious than I.

Some religious folks, I have found, are kind and pleasant, while others express their religious faith in ways that I feel is unfair or even horribly violent. Similarly, I have found that there are atheists who are kind and decent folks, while others do as awful actions as the very worst religious folks. In the end, like James, I judge a person not by their degree of religiosity, but by the fruit that comes from a person’s full range of beliefs.

Some people will enjoy reading this blog by beginning with the first post and then moving forward to the next more recent one; then to the next one; and so on. This permits readers to catch up on some ideas that were presented earlier and to move through all of the ideas in a systematic fashion to develop their emotional and social intelligence. To begin at the very first post you can click HERE.

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