Sin & Stones

Avert your eyes; it's gonna get Biblical up in here.

Awhile ago I participated in a research study, which I then blogged about. During the past week I took another survey for what I presume is the same research group. [Fair Warning: If you plan to take the same survey, and you read the rest of this post, you will be biased. Quit reading now if you plan to take a survey that includes a section called "Without Sin".]

Ironically, one of the reasoning scenarios presented in that story was the story of Jesus and the woman who committed adultry. For those of you who aren't up on your Bible stories, let me interject the relevant passage here...

"The scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in adultry, and placing her in the midst they said to him, "Teacher, this woman has been caught in the act of adultry. Now in the law Moses commanded us to stone such. What do you say about her?" This they said to test him, that they might have some charge to bring against him. Jesus bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground. And as they continued to ask him, he stood up and said to them, "Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her." And once more he bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground. But when they heard it, they went away, one by one, beginning with the eldest, and Jesus was left alone with the woman standing before him." - John 8:3-9 (RSV)

The survey task was to rate the reasoning behind Jesus' statement. There were five answers, each of which contained a slightly different degree of reasoning about the wrongness of possibly punishing an innocent person and/or the idea that since all guilt can't be punished, no guilt should be punished. I wish I could access that survey again and post the answers here, but that would be unfair to the survey-makers, who are still collecting data. My point though is that each of the provided answers totally missed the point of the statement.

To be fair, this is only my interpretation of 'the point' of that statement. You are free to interpret it differently. But it shocked me that none of the provided answers even came close to the following reasoning for saying "Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her." Jesus called on the group to examine themselves for sin. In doing so, they all found something that they had done at some time that broke the law and/or was immoral, and therefore left without throwing a stone. In examining their own sin, they undoubtedly remembered what drove them to commit those acts - what biological or psychological urges they were unable or unwilling to control. In examining themselves, they were able to empathize with the woman they were accusing. Jesus knew that understanding why the behavior had happened was more important than punishing the behavior, and this was what he wanted to convey to the group.

According to the story, "the eldest" were the first to leave. Makes sense; they had lived the longest, been tempted the most, and had likely committed the most transgressions. It was probably easiest for them to empathize with the woman. The story continues...

"Jesus looked up and said to her, "Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?" She said, "No one, Lord." And Jesus said, "Neither do I condemn you; go, and do not sin again." - John 8:10-11 (RSV)

The point here being, even the greatest and the leaders among us have known temptation and can therefore empathize with those who have succumb to it. The exhortation to avoid repeating the same mistake again remains, and the lesson here is not that we should tolerate actions which harm the fabric of our society. The woman was publicly shamed as she stood accused, but she was also given the chance to change the pattern of her actions. The opportunity for her to grow and change was more important than removing her as a 'threat' to society. Sadly this particular Biblical story does not tell us whether or not she did successfully change her pattern of actions. But it does suggest that Jesus believed that something was fundamentally more important than apportioning guilt and/or punishment.

The story also suggests that the motivations of the accusers were something other than punishment of a particular transgression. "This they said to test him, that they might have some charge to bring against him." Perhaps Jesus' motivation was simply to avoid harming a woman who was caught up in what was actually a personal grudge against him.

This is the problem with Biblical stories; they are open to such a wide variety of interpretations. No one can know the true motivations of anyone involved (or even if the sequence of events actually happened as described), and without understanding motivation, you only have half the story. The same actions, arising from different motivations, are treated differently all the time in our society. Therefore insisting on a particular interpretation of a particular action without a complete understanding of the situation is likely the result (at least partially) of a self-serving motivation.

Wow - I think my soapbox was momentarily converted into a pulpit. Scary.

The Meeting of Science and Spirit (Pt II)

"Marriage is a coming together for better or for worse, hopefully enduring, and intimate to the degree of being sacred."

If you were paying attention many months ago, you may have learned a little-known fact about me. It's not something I generally talk about, or really do much with. It's not something that I ever would have done on my own initiative; it was really the result of Really Persistent Friend's cajoling.

I mention this now for two reasons. First, the topics of spirituality, religion, and the sacred seem to be popping up a lot lately in scientifically-oriented blogs. Second, in about two weeks I will be officiating my third wedding. [Pause for the appropriate disclaimers... So far I have only done this for people I know, like, think should be married to each other, and can't say no to. I don't do it for money. I probably could have gotten out of this coming wedding request, but these two people have waited long enough to be married to each other and I'm happy to help them get it done.]

It boggled my mind when Really Persistent Friend was exceedingly persistent with the idea that I should become ordained in order to perform her wedding. I know it's 'just the internet', but it is a legally-recognized ordination, which means you have power. I got my ordination in the mail a couple of months after I defended my dissertation, and the ordination was the scarier of the two. Seriously. A Ph.D. (sadly) comes with no perception or obligation of service to others, whereas an ordination exists solely for the purpose of permitting one to serve others in a specific capacity.

You may think that I'm referring only to service in the capacity that is confined to and defined by the legal code. But then you probably have never seen a roomful of people looking at you through the only definition they have of 'minister'. You've probably never felt the weight of the expectations of the bride and groom (and their parents) to conduct a ceremony that conveys the appropriate sense of sacredness. (Best Friend's in-laws were in tears because we incorporated a unity candle into her ceremony. They saw respect for their Catholic tradition, even though the ceremony had no overt religious references.) If you view ordination as an obligation of service, rather than just a chance to make money, then you are well-advised to ask yourself - What is the nature of the service I am providing? What is required of me to perform this service effectively? Do I possess the necessary education, experience and skills to render this service?

I required Really Persistent Friend to articulate in great detail why she wasn't willing to get married in a church or by a justice of the peace before I agreed to become ordained. The essence of those conversations can be summed up in the phrase 'spiritual, but not religious'. Most people who identify as 'spiritual, but not religious' were religious (or exposed to religion) at some point. Like it or not, the concepts that we generally think of as 'spiritual' are concepts we derive from religion. Even concepts like 'love' and 'compassion' don't find a lot of support in hard science. Scientists can give a convoluted explanation for altruistic behavior that invokes genetic survival, but the explanation utterly fails to capture the experience.

Both Best Friend and Really Persistent Friend also recognized that the people who attended the wedding would have strong associations of marriage as a sacrament involving God. As a wedding exists to announce one's union to a community of friends and family, they wanted to acknowledge the perceptions of their family with respect to the sacredness of marriage. They felt that marriage was something more than a simple legal pronouncement, but that it was not created solely by the depth or blessing of traditional religious ritual. The task of culling a sense of 'sacred' from the trappings of so many rituals fell to me.

Perhaps it's a task for which a psychologist is ideally suited. The ability to understand the subjective importance of experience and the need for explanation and order in one's perceptions, as well as the function of a 'greater force' in one's belief system, are essential if we are ever going to succeed in divorcing the good aspects of spirituality from the dogma and harmfulness of religion. This is perhaps easiest for a scientist who has been trained to ask penetrating questions and shed light on relationships between ideas/behaviors/elements. And that is why thoughtful dialogue between science and spirit is worth encouraging. Not because one side seeks to win the other over, but because both want the best possible information about what it means to be human.

Features of the New Society

Something about today reminded me of this quote...

"But those who have not given up hope can succeed only if they are hardheaded realists, shed all illusions, and fully appreciate the difficulties. This sobriety marks the distinction between awake and dreaming utopians."

There seems to be a widespread hope that one man can do a significant amount to "fix the world" and "put in place an architecture of peace for the 21st century." That's a mighty tall order...

The idea of "fixing the world" prompted me to post the next paragraph of the above quotation.

"To mention only a few of the difficulties the construction of the new society has to solve:

• It would have to solve the problem of how to continue the industrial mode of production without total centralization, i.e., without ending up in fascism of the old-fashioned type or, more likely, technological 'fascism with a smiling face.'
• It would have to combine overall planning with a high degree of decentralization, giving up the 'free-market economy,' that has become largely a fiction.
• It would have to give up the goal of unlimited growth for selective growth, without running the risk of economic disaster.
• It would have to create work conditions and a general spirit in which not material gain but other, psychic satisfactions are effective motivations.
• It would have to further scientific progress and, at the same time, prevent this progress from becoming a danger to the human race by its practical application.
• It would have to create conditions under which people experience well-being and joy, not the satisfaction of the maximum-pleasure drive.
• It would have to give basic security to individuals without making them dependent on a bureaucracy to feed them.
• It must restore the possibilities for 'individual initiative' in living, rather than in business (where it hardly exists any more anyway)."

Oddly presentient of our current situation in many aspects .

Bonus points if you can name the source and/or author of that quote. (Hint: 1967)

Why We Believe

"For if you have never had a paranormal experience such as these, and believe in none of the things that science says do not exist excepts as tricks played on the gullible or - as neuroscientists are now beginning to see - by the normal workings of the mind carried to an extreme, well, then you are in a lonely minority." - Newsweek, November 3rd, 2008.

I know that I was thinking about other things during the week before the November elections. Which is probably why I didn't notice this article well before tonight's long-overdue cleaning of the abode brought it to my attention. I'll comment on it here, as a follow-up to my recent post.

I'll start with a brief run-down of some of my internal comments while reading the article...

"Here we go again with 'psychic phenomena = alien abduction'."
"Shermer, Shermer, oh Shermer again." (I personally think that Shermer is a reasonable, though overly-invested, skeptic. But no wonder parts of this article read like some of his recent columns in Scientific American.)
"Crap, this is long."
"Who decided that the week before the election was a good time to run this piece? And why?"

For those of you who won't bother to read the article, let me just present a list of the proposed explanations for paranormal beliefs...

• People see more patterns in noise when they feel a loss of control. Our current social and political turmoil predicts the current rise of interest in the paranormal. (I can't in good conscience touch that.)
• An inability to think scientifically, as demonstrated by self-professed alien abductees who wouldn't accept an alternative hypothetical explanation for their experiences. (Hey, if I woke up on the floor, I'd believe I had fallen out of the bed.)
• Loneliness. Apparently telling people that they will end up lonely and socially-isolated is enough to make them more likely to confess a belief in the paranormal. (Shit! I should be out partying tonight instead of at home cleaning...)
• Our brain wasn't evolved for actual reality. We sometimes shut down the part of the brain ("a bundle of neurons in the superior parietal lobe") that distinguishes where our body begins and the material world ends. (Sweet! All I have to do is turn these neurons off and I'll have a built-in trip?! How do I patent that?)
• Your brain is filling in the blanks with regards to sensory information. It's all in the interpretation. We use our "existing cognitive structures to make sense of an ambiguous or amorphous stimuli." (That's true, but it's funny how we never invoked that excuse to explain how people perceive something that science agrees is actually there...)
• It's all your imagination because "the regions that become active when people imagine seeing or hearing something are identical to those that become active they really do see or hear something in the outside world." (It's a miracle that we can distinguish one from the other at all!)
• It's all the mind reinforcing itself with that good ol' psychological glitch called the confirmation bias - "the mind better recalls events and experiences that validate what we believe than those that refute those beliefs." (Until someone explains to you that 'he's just not that into you.')
• We evolved to have a brain that protects us by signalling false positives for threatening phenomena. (Theoretically though, this should be cancelled out by the 'it's all your imagination', right?)

Ah, and now the list of proposed explanations for extreme skepticism...

• A feeling of intellectual superiority. "It is rewarding to look at the vast hordes of believers, conclude that they are idiots and delight in the fact that you aren't." (The academic counterpart to 'holier than thou'.)
• It allows one to belong to a community, which is what we all crave. (Can't I just join a book club? Or a volleyball league? Seriously - why do we need to create community around our respective beliefs in the paranormal?)

That's it. End of list.

Just remember - if you have the impression that this article has a clear bias, it's probably all in your imagination because your brain is wired to confirm its belief that journalism is unbiased. Maybe you're stressed and therefore you're seeing a pattern that really isn't there. Maybe you should go find some friends, or take a course in logical thinking. Maybe your brain is trying to protect you by alerting you to the possible threat of media indoctrination.

Dude, seriously.

The Meeting of Science and Spirit

"Knowledge of our spirits and knowledge of the world are mutually enlightening and empowering. The ultimate aim of both is to dissipate suffering."

The other day I had a fairly engaged conversation with Skeptical Friend. By 'fairly engaged', I mean that I was actively trying to avoid the reduction of the conversation to the level of rhetoric and dogma. When pressed, Skeptical Friend's concerns were these...

1) Belief in one paranormal/New Age phenomenon leads to a widespread embracing of other phenomena, without the appropriate skepticism to each claim. Embracing claims without the appropriate skepticism is tantamount to being a target for every charlatan who wishes to prey upon your ignorance.

2) Belief in paranormal/New Age ideas is equivalent to belief in God, or some other equally-unprovable idea. Belief in an idea for which the evidence is tenuous at best puts you at the mercy of 'representatives' of that idea who claim special knowledge and/or abilities, unless your knowledge happens to exceed theirs. Again you are a target for those who would shape your behavior according to their ideals.

3) Somehow those who are not so gullible will end up paying for the actions of those who were not appropriately skeptical.

(I'm being generous. SF wasn't so concise or articulate.)

My response to this (in part) was that the line in the sand that lumps the anomalous psychic experience with ghost and UFO abduction on one side, and 'hard science' like physics and chemistry on the other, is part of the problem. Scientists who loudly denounced a 'psychic' or 'spiritual' experience as impossible and therefore hallucination or hoax do not convince people who believe that they have had such an experience that nothing happened. Rather, they suggest or reinforce the notion that the person must go elsewhere (somewhere other than science) for an explanation.

Where else do you go if you are a person who has had an experience or series of experiences that you cannot dismiss? You look for 1) someone who will acknowledge your experience, and 2) someone who will offer an explanation for what happened. Perhaps the best that mainstream science (and I use the term 'science' loosely) can do at this point is the psychoanalyst who tells you that your subconscious is trying to tell you something important, and who then works with you to deal with any problems you are having in your life. But the psychoanalyst is in fierce competition with the priest and New Age section at the local bookstore. Science is in a competition for the minds of the masses as long as it continues to deny the experiences of rational, intelligent people that it cannot yet explain. As long as scientists perpetuate this kind of arrogant denial, they leave open the gate that allows people to go elsewhere for explanations. Science doesn't have to have complete understanding of the world in order to be useful, but it will only be useful to people if it acknowledges its incompleteness.

Until science can explain the natural laws that give rise to these mental and 'spiritual' phenomena that are consistently experienced by people of every age, level of education, and cultural background, it would be wise to do the following...

1) Encourage scientific investigation into these phenomena. Ridicule and isolation of those scientists who do investigate these areas only slows our ultimate progress towards a complete understanding the source of these experiences.

2) Educate our children in basic psychology and self-awareness. Nothing engenders a healthy skepticism like seeing your own vulnerability to illusions of memory and perception exposed. Nothing protects a person from being taken advantage of like an understanding of the social and psychological motivations for behavior.

3) Avoid the dogma that science is all-knowing, and that what does not fall under its current understanding must not exist. Chastise scientists whose claims exceed the boundaries of their actual knowledge. No scientist should be able to state that God does not exist, and for exactly the same reasons as no scientist should be able to state that God does exist.

4) Understand the needs that are currently being met by religion and/or metaphysical beliefs. It is not the place of science to address these needs, but science can play a vital role in identifying how to meet these needs without introducing any unnecessary beliefs or behaviors.