In the process of defending “militant atheism,” physicist Lawrence Krauss writes something inadvertently revealing:
In science, of course, the very word “sacred” is profane. No ideas, religious or otherwise, get a free pass. The notion that some idea or concept is beyond question or attack is anathema to the entire scientific undertaking.
What a strange concept of “the sacred” this man has!
For him, something “sacred” is something that must not be questioned and that requires protection. It’s a word for something that must not be discussed. It’s like the only concept of the sacred he has is of the Holy Bible for people who believe it is the literal word of God.
I don’t want to get into a deep theological discussion here, but that’s a very pinched and truncated view of the sacred.
When I think about the concept, I think about something very personal that a person does to put them in a certain state of mind. This could include other people, as a wedding ceremony must, but it is more often something a person does privately. Maybe they rub their rosary beads. Maybe they wash their feet in a very ritualized way. Maybe they wash your feet.
Have you even been to a concert of the Gyoto Monks?
I have.
Whatever it is that they’re doing, it has to do with putting themselves and the audience in touch with the sacred. And I suppose Richard Wagner was attempting much the same thing.
The sacred is something that might be hard to talk about, but no one says you can’t try.
Of course, a zen master might slap your face for impertinence, but sacredness isn’t just some dogma that you can’t question. By definition, dogma is a set of beliefs that can be communicated in words. Those propositions are supposed to at least approximate logical thinking, although when the mind stumbles over something like The Trinity there’s always the fallback that religion isn’t ultimately rational at all and we must have “faith.”
I don’t want to argue about the proper definition of words, particularly when talking about a concept that defies simple description, but when people talk about “the sanctity of marriage” they aren’t generally limiting themselves to thinking that marriage is defined one way (and only one way) in the Bible. The concept is that marriage is a spiritual compact and something that God intended for us. The ceremony and rituals surrounding marriage are meant to reinforce this by allowing us to enter into the sacred and see in the process something transformative.
I would think gays and lesbians would be much less interested in getting married if they didn’t share this sense that marriage is more significant (or, at least, it can be) than some simple contractual agreement. You can see the sacredness and sanctity in marriage without wanting in any way to deny this to same-sex couples.
Or, you can see it as all religious hokey-pokey, signifying nothing and likely to end in misery and divorce.
My point is, a physicist isn’t required to be a cynic about such things.
Booman, you want to come into the 21st Century on this?
“I would think gays and lesbians would be much less interested in getting married if they didn’t share this sense that marriage is more significant …”
Have you ever heard of income tax? Hospital visitation rights? Adoption ceremonies? Family insurance? Mortgage payment plans? Visa status changes?
I don’t doubt that many of the gay couples DO feel that there is something more than simply business advantages. But to say that you have to have some kind of mysterious connection to an imaginary something somewhere?
Get Real.
Did I say somewhere that people have to see something sacred in marriage in order to want to get married?
Also, there’s really nothing imaginary about a state of mind.
I’m with you, Booman. Yes, marriage has a secular component and various legal advantages (and disadvantages). But for some, there’s another quality that goes with it. I don’t think that has to flow from a sense of the divine. It may be enough to simply commit to “love, honor and care for . . . ’till death do us part.” The practical nature of committing to wipe someone’s ass when they can’t wipe it themselves is certainly mundane and yet there’s an element of deep commitment and service that might touch one in something very beautiful.
My spiritual path is all about giving people a direct tasting of the divine, using techniques not all that different from that of those Buddhist monks. Our chanting is silent but, like them, we use sacred sounds designed to help one tune into subtle realms. We speak of God directly but, since anything one says about God is limited by words, it is in some sense false. If one goes deep enough with many forms of Buddhism one finds God in it.
I love science too. Science is my first love. Even as a little kid, growing up in an agnostic-cum-atheist home, I felt God’s fingerprints all over everything. In other words, whatever it is that draws me to spirituality has been inside me all along.
There’s no contradiction between science and religion. They’re just different domains. What could be more inspiring than the worlds within worlds within worlds of molecules, atoms and subatomic particles. Or the seemingly infinite nature of space and the relativity of time itself. All blind blowing stuff. Or head out into an old growth forest and study that tiny slice of knowledge we understand about it — interdependent systems within systems. If that doesn’t blow your mind, nothing will.
And yet all of that is nothing compared to a direct tasting of God. That’s what we’re all, deep down, yearning for. Those monks know what they’re doing. They’re going for it directly. In the west, we tend to substitute material addictions and relationships with other people for our deep need for connection to oneness. So much of earning money is about seeking love and approval. The part of us that wants independence is seeking a form of power and protection. But there is no protection in this world. Any one of us could find out tomorrow that we have cancer or that a child of ours has died tragically. There is no foundation upon which to stand other than God and humility and prayer. As much as we may think we know, in truth we know virtually nothing. As much as we feel in control of our lives, we are not.
If, like a Buddhist, you prefer to take God out of the equation, that’s fine. Think in terms of acceptance of what is. Think in terms of non-resistance. That’s a deeply, profoundly spiritual concept and practice. The vast majority of us (which certainly includes me) could spend a lifetime practicing surrender without ever reaching its depths. Yet our striving for connection and surrender is itself a profoundly meaningful journey. A sacred journey in my book.
Deep down, I’m not yearning for that.
I’m frankly uninterested in it.
But it’s something I recognize in other people as a real and profound need, and I’d even call it “normal.”
I’ve learned to live with being different and to accommodate myself to the reality I was born into rather than constantly wishing it (and people) were different and more like me.
Because I’ve battled my own addictions and dealt with addiction in friends and family quite a bit over the last few years, I’ve come to see a lot more about human frailty actually works in the real world.
It changed my priorities even more towards alleviating suffering rather than making people think logically.
I’ve nothing to sell and am not trying to get your agreement. By all means feel free to see things your own way. I personally believe that underneath all addiction is a need for God (or unity or love or whatever you want to call it). I believe the need for connection to be universal and that it can get veiled by the many distractions of this world.
I have some tendency toward addiction too. In my case it wasn’t substances but rather love, sex, exciting experiences and the like. Looking back, I tell people I was looking for God in all the wrong places.
But as I’ve said, feel free to see things your own way. I don’t think the stories we tell ourselves are all that important. What’s important is the love we carry in our hearts. I think the worst thing people do with religion is create separation by arguing over things like scripture and meaning. The Qu’ran specifically instructs not to do this. It says we should do our best to treat everyone as our brother or sister and leave the rest to God. I personally don’t think God judges us based on our beliefs or piety. Those touched with a yearning for spiritual connection are, in my view, blessed. Ultimately, I’m guessing we’re judged on our intentions and in that realm I’m sure you and I are firmly on the same page — wanting the world to leave the world a better place than we found it and willing to do our share of the heavy lifting to help move things in that direction.
Underneath most self-destructive behavior is self-loathing, which is another concept that is so foreign to me that I think of it as a personal fault that I don’t do some of it.
But, again, I’m not normal.
I have no idea what it’s like to not feel okay about myself or to worry what others think or to be wracked with guilt or to suffer debilitating self-doubt or to obsess about my appearance or to feel like I am stupid or inadequate or ugly or fat or worthless.
Most of the addicts I encounter are suffering from most or all of those things and are overcompensating in all kinds of ways, abusing substances being only one of them.
You can say that they need God or oneness, and maybe they could use that. What they need more than anything is to change the conversation they’re always having with themselves.
And any number of sacred things can help with that. Obviously, most of them are in serious need of forgiveness and have legitimate guilt and debilitating remorse. They need both to get a second chance and to somehow believe that they deserve one.
Christianity is kind of tailor-made for what they need.
There’s definitely truth in what you say. I’ve noticed that those who had challenging childhoods are more likely to be drawn to God than those who have not. However, I still think it’s a universal need. Early trauma just flushes to the surface our neediness. Others, with stronger ego defenses, might find themselves drawn to God when life inflicts really hard challenges upon them. Sooner or later we all face something and feel the need for connection in a way that doesn’t make sense to the rational mind.
Of course I have no proof for the things. It’s just my sense of things.
The state of mind of paranoid schizophrenia is not imaginary?
Of course there are states of mind that are what we call “delusional” in the sense that they cause people to believe things about the outside world that are inaccurate or untrue. These can be mild or severe, and when they are severe they present a danger to the person having them and sometimes even to the people around them.
These states of mind are not imaginary. They are quite real and can get you killed.
Certain religious beliefs can certainly fall into this category and often have.
The distinction I am making, however, is that a mental state is a thing in the physical universe. It might be significantly different in type from a table or chair, but it isn’t something that defies the laws of physics or that exists in some other world.
It is not imaginary.
When you imagine a unicorn, you are imagining something that doesn’t exist except in drawings, cheesy movies, and stuffed animals, but that doesn’t mean that your idea is imaginary.
Likewise, people’s spiritual experiences are real. How they interpret them might be delusional, but that they have them in not in dispute.
And what people think has as much real-world effect as any other force of nature. If I decide to give my life over to Christ and stop drinking and quit working for the check cashing joint so I can devote myself to the homeless, my interior thought processes made that happen and worked in the real world with the same effectiveness as gravity.
If what caused that change in my interior life was listening to monks chant or staring at a crucifix or worshipping in a church or being overawed by the architecture in a Cathedral or simple desperation, there is a causal chain there where what happened inside me changed the physical world around me.
The point here is that myth and ritual invite people to enter into these mental states that make personal transformation possible, and they often work precisely as intended.
This isn’t a miracle. It’s how the sacred works and why it exists.
You can argue with his usage, but he’s just expressing an idea that’s central to the scientific enterprise even if it’s often honored in the breach.
I’ve spent years in both physics and the biological sciences, and I think physicists have a particularly tense relationship with religion and faith, although of course there are many successful physicists who are also religious. Physics comes closest to touching how the universe was created and how the world works at the simplest level – quantum physics and cosmology go deeper than evolution or geology. Most Christians accept that the seven days of Genesis are a metaphor, but how do you go about fitting true randomness in the picture?
Also physicists imbibe the stories of Galileo and Copernicus very early in their training, and I can’t think of any other scientific discipline with a history of that level of persecution.
So this particular quote sounds like any physicist on any campus anywhere on a typical day.
It’s pretty stupid, frankly, to take people’s tendency to arrive at bad reasons for believing stupid shit and use that as an excuse to blast the idea of the sacred.
You’re attacking the wrong thing.
And it’s the flip side of fundamentalists, who also tend to miss the traditional meaning and purpose of mythology and ritual.
It’s not stupid. Even Einstein said “God doesn’t play dice with the world” – and he was wrong even though he was a pretty smart guy. These guys are trained to reject the idea of the sacred within their field, even if they believe in the sacred in other aspects of their lives.
Militant atheism sounds like a problem, but not this quote.
Not to sound like “the enlightened one,” but having rowed past this intersection two decades ago, it’s hard for me to even get back upstream far enough to remember where most people are coming from on the science vs. religion question.
What Einstein was talking about was the role of some kind of active providence in the workings of the world as it can be understood through science. You can say that he’s wrong or not depending on what you’re trying to correct.
But all of that is irrelevant to the sacred, at least if you are willing to understand what I’m seeking to define here.
Take a crucifix.
How is it sacred?
If you think it’s magical and can create miracles that defy physics, well, it can’t do that and you’re wrong.
If you think it is an object in the real world than can cause people to enter into a state of interior mindfulness or that can otherwise cause transformative changes in the interior life of a person who contemplates it, then that’s a totally different definition of sacred.
Of course, almost anything can cause an interior change in someone, but we’ve built up a cultural heritage in myth and ritual that you can examine across time and continents. You can talk about archetypes or whatever, but the point is that people keep going back to the same kinds of solutions to tap into the sacred.
Some people use well-worn approaches, some people create their own individualized approaches, and some people watch reality television.
The point is that marriage and the rituals surrounding marriage are sacred in the same way that any number of other human rituals are sacred.
That’s doesn’t mean that these rituals cannot be questioned nor that there are any physics-defying properties to them.
It means that they are designed, through long experience, to bring about a state of mind in people and that the state of mind is supposed to provide meaning and significance.
These rituals accomplish this, and the effect can probably be studied by scientists by examining the brain and people’s behaviors.
Another way of looking at this is that religion is highly evolved to produce certain kinds of mental states that are highly desirable for people to have. It does this most effectively through myth and ritual and not through dogma and logic.
The people who fight science vs. dogma battles are missing out on the whole reason that religion exists.
“The people who fight science vs. dogma battles are missing out on the whole reason that religion exists.”
Nail, head, bang!
I never rowed past this question easily, but I agree with everything you just wrote.
I do think that a religious story or text is sacred in the same way a crucifix is, and that it’s the story or the text or the dogma or the objects that the physicist is rejecting as a basis for scientific understanding. I doubt he refers to the mental state.
Personally I’ve had some of my deepest, most connected experiences when I focused for hours on math or physics problems. Hearing the Christmas or the Easter story in church is more like comfort food, and I go outdoors and feel the sunlight and the wind to feel connected. 🙂
I am a scientist. His comment is perfectly reasonable, and perfectly rational from the scientific perspective.
Let me deconstruct:
I’m not concerned about the sacred at work. I concern myself with my purpose in life by my choice of occupation. I believe that my efforts are in line with my beliefs. Thus, there is no issue for me. My beliefs have nothing to do with science, however.
If religion is about “beliefs” then it comes into conflict with science repeatedly, and never wins.
If religion is about the sacred, however, it is not in conflict with science at all. That’s because the sacred is not about beliefs at all. It is about using the exterior world to transform our interior world.
As an atheist scientist who is also a Unitarian Universalist (which has nothing to do with beliefs)- this.
An Atheist scientist who is a UU and who just sat through 3 committee meetings (fortunately one had adult beverages) – also this.
Some people including some scientists believe science can answer the questions in 6 or that because they can’t be answered the questions are foolish. This is the heart of the divide imo.
Trump seems to have a strange relationship with sacredness of the free market. That mega-increase in CNN ad rates for the second GOP debate (how can those rates be anything other than pure capitalism in action?) has made Trump a bit hot under the collar. Understandable considering that without him on that debate stage, CNN could only hope not to do worse than break even. But not one for half measures, like requesting CNN donate 10% of its debate profits to a charity, he’s demanding 100% to VETERANS groups.
Me? I’m with Krauss. “Sacred” and all religion-supernatural words and concepts are simply code for “things I do not want to explain or defend as real.” For a long time I didn’t know why people were so interested in explaining and justifying their ‘faith,’ but I think I know why: they are desperately trying to convince themselves, because deep down they know what they know and what they don’t.
When people have emotional reactions, I don’t see anything beyond emotions. If you think you’re seeing something divine — good for you!
I agree with a portion of what you’ve said. Much of what calls itself religion is about social agreement. Believe what I believe because that helps me believe it. To me, that’s crap. It’s not religion at all; just dogma. Real religion places one in a space of deep peace and awe. It touches one into experiences that are beyond words. When you’ve been touched by that, it connects you to something deep within. There’s a passage in the Qu’ran that talks about how, at creation, all the souls were asked, “Am I your Lord?” All the souls, according to this teaching, bowed deeply and said, “Yes, you are my Lord.” This teaching is metaphorical of course. What I think it’s trying to get at is that part of us that deeply yearns to touch the face of God.
No doubt that “yearning” has a lot to do with why many people engage in rituals, especially prayer.
I have no access to this yearning and only observe it as an 19th-Century Swiss anthropologist might observe some Amazonian tribe’s rain dance.
I don’t think personal motivation has a necessary component in the sacred. I don’t think we need to talk about “the face of God.”
We’re really talking about something that exists in the physical world, which is our brain. And we’re talking about brain-states.
The sacred is a basically a brain-state, and the rituals and myths are outward ways of getting your brain into those kinds of states.
There can be personal motivations for this but there are also coercive motivations for it coming from the people who have traditionally controlled the rituals. Most of these are quite wise governing philosophies and some of them are quite good for assisting people in being (for a lack of a better term) happier in their own skin.
The possibility of atonement and forgiveness are super powerful for creating mental well-being and providing an avenue for personal transformation and actual redemption. In Alcoholics Anonymous, the main focus early on is on getting people to believe that they aren’t responsible for their sickness and to get them to atone for every shitty thing they’ve done. It actually works pretty well if people actually believe it and follow directions.
Accepting Jesus as your personal savior is the last act of a scoundrel, but it’s also quite effective for turning scoundrels into passably decent human beings. The key here is sincerity.
All of this has been created for good reasons, but the logical forms of control are more tyrannical and tend toward creating dissonant and uncomfortable states of mind. It is to alleviate these feelings of dissonance and discomfort that people create and try to enforce dogma on each other.
In the end, if you stop drinking and stop beating your wife and kids and start acting like a good person, I could not care less if the reason you changed your ways was because you decided to believe in some dogma. What really changed you wasn’t some logical argument, but a spiritual transformation that was probably brought about less by conversation than by entering into the sacred through some myth or ritual.
“The key here is sincerity.”
That’s exactly what the Qu’ran teaches. One can do all the scripted practices and rituals perfectly but, without sincerity, they get thrown back in one’s face. But even done poorly, if there’s sincerity, every imperfection will be forgiven. Take one tiny step toward God and you’ll find God running toward you. That’s another teaching. So don’t pray to impress others or out of shame or guilt or obligation. Pray out of your sincere love for God and your desire to know Him.
It’s like Rumi says in his poem, “Love Dogs”
“Listen to the moan of a dog for its master.
That whining is the connection.
There are love dogs
no one knows the names of.
Give your life
to be one of them.”
I think one makes a mistake in equating all experience with the brain. Obviously the brain is an enormous part of who we are. The reductionist says it’s all we are. The person of faith is open to the possibility that our essence goes deeper and survives, in some form, the death of the brain. That’s what I believe one touches into through certain forms of spiritual practice. My tradition teaches that the center of our humanity is not our brain but our heart. And not the physical heart that pumps blood but an experiential center that feels like it exists in the chest.
Like you, I was raised in a rational, reductionist tradition. I’ve just been touched again and again by these experiences of transcendence (from the time I was a small child) that I cannot accept a narrow reductionist worldview. Experiences with psychedelic drugs in college only confirmed what I already felt, and then my spiritual journeys since then have provided further confirmation.
At this point, I know certain things about myself. I’m not an existentialist. I believe there is meaning beyond the meaning we ascribe to life. I also believe there is some essence that survives death but I don’t know that it includes any of the small “s” self that we identify as ourselves most of the time. There’s some deeper sense of self that one can connect to through spiritual practice, through drugs or in times of great stress. That essence has much to do with the choices we make and how our lives manifest.
When my wife was 12 weeks pregnant, she had an ultrasound. When we first saw our child that day, we both wept. We felt his presence and had a sense of bring introduced to him (though we didn’t know he was a he yet). There was something of his essence there that predated the existence of anything one might call a brain. Of course I cannot prove this but I feel certain that it is true.
I want to add that I remain pro-choice. I think of abortion as something very sad and tragic. I can no longer imagine wanting a sexual partner to abort a child. But I would never support any law imposing on women the obligation to carry a child to term. That would be to impose my beliefs and prejudices on others. If God is real, then born or unborn, we’re all just fine. And if I’m just very deluded, and life ends at the destruction of the brain, then there’s even less reason to prevent the abortion of a clump of cells before it develops a brain or sense of self.
I don’t know.
In one sense I am making a reductionist argument, but in another I am really arguing for a much more expansive view of the sacred than a typical physicist is willing or able to contemplate.
When I look at a sacred object or ritual, what I see first is what it is supposed to do and what it actually does or can do.
And they can do a lot more than many atheists or physicists or secularists will readily acknowledge.
This isn’t because they’ve misinterpreted the thing by failing to give it magical properties or a holy untouchable status.
It’s because they too often fall into the same trap as the religious folks in dividing the mental (spiritual) world off from the scientific world.
Basically, virtually everything I do is because some part of my brain told the other parts of my body to do it. If I hammer a nail, it’s really something mental that caused that. So, if religion is largely about getting people to behave in certain ways, it’s actually pretty effective and it has real consequences in the physical world all the time. It’s both the point of religion and just a fact that it does real things and causes real changes.
So, you know, if you ask whether God exists in a traditional sense, the answer is probably no (depending on how you’re defining the term, of course). But if you ask a different question, which is whether God causes things to happen in the real world, well, yes, the answer is yes. Because God is an idea just like a hammer and a nail is an idea, and the idea causes people to do things all the time.
In both cases (God and the hammer), I am the real instrument for change, but it’s hard to argue that one idea is less effectual than the other.
When you talk about transcendence and other ways you try to speak about spiritual experience, I think of that as the realm of the sacred, certainly. It’s part of the interplay between how things in the outside world inspire you to think differently (on a different plane) and then, ultimately, to act differently. In this way, sacred objects and rituals work on your mind to change you and change your actions, making them effectively agents of action themselves.
Therefore, you reading a passing a Rumi actually causes something to happen, and in the pathway of the cause and effect is your personal spiritual experience that goes on in entirely in your head. It may even be that you feel that this experience is happening outside your head and that provides the motivation for new action. But nothing you are aware of ever happens outside of your head. What you get from outside is simply stimulus or information, but it is wasted as sunlight on a rock if your brain doesn’t interpret it.
Maybe this seems bleak to some people, but the brain is actually a far more spectacular thing that most religious or even nonreligious people are willing to give it credit for. It creates all the religious experience and all the spirituality and all the wonder and joy we are capable of. It’s all in there and we can take it all away piece by piece or in big chunks if we want to. Just give me a scalpel.
It just doesn’t strike me as true that all these things are false and worthless because our brain is responsible for creating them. For me, it doesn’t reduce their worth at all, it just explains how we feel these things and think them.
Let your brain search for meaning. It’s capable of finding it.
Well, once again I agree in part. The brain is certainly a very spectacular organ. Like so many things, we understand very little about it and still, even the tiny bit we do know can inspire awe. Science can inspire feelings very much like religion and, for many, the two are not necessarily far apart in that sense. As William Blake said, “All the world in a grain of sand.”
Still, the notion that the brain is all there is — is essentially a statement of faith. As is the statement that the brain isn’t all there is. The truth is we don’t know.
At the same time, there are phenomena that are hard to explain unless one considers the possibility of mind function beyond the brain. For example, people who have near death experiences who describe intricate details of their surgery or conversations going on, even in other rooms from their bodies, at times when they were brain dead. Another phenomenon that no one has been able to explain is terminal lucidity. This is where someone with dementia or who’s brain is otherwise unable to process information — suddenly, just before death, begins in engaging in normal conversation.
Most of us have experienced something that’s hard to explain. Many years ago, I was in a car on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington with my girlfriend at the time. We it black ice at around 70 miles an hour and spun out violently, hitting a wall at about 55. Fortunately we were in a Volvo 240 and we walked away without a scratch.
But just when the accident occurred, my father, who was in Tucson, began frantically calling my good friend in Seattle, with whom we were supposed to be staying that night. He kept calling and calling, wanting to know if my friend had heard from us. When we finally got to the ferry, I found a pay phone and called my friend. He told me that my dad had been worried sick. That’s the only time in my life my dad every expressed that level of anxiety or concern about my safety.
What connects a father and son in such a way?
Another phenomena that cannot be explained in any conventional way, though it doesn’t involve the brain but rather communication at speeds faster than light is quantum entanglement. Here’s a link: http://www.livescience.com/28550-how-quantum-entanglement-works-infographic.html
No one understands how it works. That doesn’t mean there’s no explanation. It’s my guess that everything has an explanation — even phenomenon that people identify as religious or spiritual. Ultimately science and religion could be the same thing. We’re just very limited in terms of what we can understand and what we can test using scientific method.
Certainly there are many more things in the universe than human brains and consciousness. Thumb tacks, for example, and turtle turds.
The mistake is to cut off consciousness from the natural world. It’s true that we must do this to some extent just to communicate effectively. I’ve been talking about the outside world and the inside world, and the portals between them. But this shouldn’t be seen as some hard dividing line anymore than the door between the kitchen and the garage should be seen to separate things that are part of the home from things that are not.
For physicists, the common mistake is to discount the way ideas act like a force which can create action. They don’t screw this up in a mathematical sense, but only when they put down their tools and start trying to contextualize.
For the religious, the mistake is think that anything that the brain does that isn’t as plane as the nose on your face is somehow otherworldly.
As far as your experience, everything you’ve ever thought or had happen to you, you only know those things through your brain.
I can take tweezers and remove a memory from your brain. I can remove the part that makes you understand spoken language. I can remove the part that makes you remember a face. Other things (memories and functions) have such redundancy that they either cannot be removed without taking the whole brain or they have the ability to come back.
Even if you discovered what we call extra-sensory perception, it would be your brain that was perceiving it. The only change is that we can perceive in more ways than we thought. Did you know that elephants use their feet to hear tremendous distances?
How can the brain create memories when it is seemingly in sleep-mode? That’s a question for science. How can you sometimes “see” things that your eyes are not in a position to see? Also a brain function that we can someday understand. How can your father have a “sense” that you are in danger?
Well, either it’s coincidence or not, but it’s still his brain that perceived the danger. The mystery is only how his brain might have received the information. As I said, the typical problem is failure to give the brain as much credit as it deserves, but there’s no reason to think that any physical laws have been violated. If the brain creates all religious and spiritual experience, then it does more than most of us think it is capable of doing. That’s all.
You can call this reductionism, but it’s not your typical reductionism because I’m not saying that the brain is limited to the type of five-senses common sense perception that we normally ascribe to it.
Nor do I think brains are the only organs or things in the universe that perceive or have consciousness. But they’re all we have.
As far as we know and can prove, I agree. But I don’t limit the possibilities to what we know and can thus far prove. Perhaps we’re not really saying anything all that different from each other.
I’ve heard it postulated that the brain might be like a radio that can receive signals from sources other than the five senses. If so, what are the source of those messages and what do they imply about reality? The other huge question is whether the brain is the source of all consciousness. Yes, we know that certain functions happen in certain parts of the brain. But, as said previously, there are phenomena we cannot explain. Such as perceptions people may have when their brain functions are flat-lined.
With regard to such issues, I think the only proper stance is to be open to possibility. No doubt whatever the answers are, they will probably be far more interesting than anything we could make up about it.
Lastly, I just want to say that my spiritual tradition sees itself as a sort of science. Masters often refer to “the science of tasawuuf,” the science of Sufism. It’s certainly not a science in the way we think of it and I don’t mean to imply otherwise. But there are certain time-tested ways of opening the human being to God consciousness. The Sufis are masters of the means of cleaning trama and opening to the experience of love. It tends to work best, in my view, when not watered down and westernized. Like most spiritual traditions, it works best in its ancient context — in this case in Arabic and together with the outer teachings of Islam.
But then again, a Zen Master may not slap your face. While often it is what it is, it is as often not.
Walk in beauty.
Which is why the Goddess gave us art.
Consider that one stolen, starting now.
I think it was a bit of a disservice to Professor Krauss to not also include the paragraph from his article which precedes the snippet that you highlighted. It gives a bit of context to his argument concerning his usage of “sacred”. I see much back and forth in this thread about everyone’s varying takes on “sacred, but I strain to find where the actual meaning of the word is defined so that some ground rules are established up front about just what the hell it is that everyone is arguing about. Everyone is making their cases without properly defining just what exactly is the meaning of the word. If everyone is coming at this with their own personal interpretation of what it means, then aren’t we all just arguing past each other?
Exactly. It’s usually trite to quote the dictionary, but in this case, it’s appropriate. The OED has 5 definitions for “sacred.” Four of them are variations on “religious”, and one uses “sacrosanct” (which seems to me a tautology). All of the definitions generally describe things regarded as holy.
Sure, sacred music can be beautiful and moving, but that’s not how Krauss is using the word. He’s clear that he means something accepted as dogma, revealed rather than proven, which is antithetical to science.
He uses the word correctly. You prefer a broader definition, but I think you’re just arguing semantics.
“You” referring to BooMan, not MikeInOhio.
well, it’s not possible to have a narrower definition of the sacred than that it is unproven dogma that can’t be challenged.
We used modifiers for that, like “cow” or different words like “sacrosanct.”
It seems ridiculous to say that proposition A is sacred.
It does not seem ridiculous to say that practice A is a sacred ritual.
One way to look at it is “sacred vs. profane”, where sacred comprises all that isn’t worldly or irreverent. In that case, yes, he’s using a narrow definition.
That’s a rather archaic dichotomy, but it’s not worthless.
It makes more sense to think about the sacred as being entirely mental rather than it being otherworldly.
In that sense, profane is not a useful term anymore, really.
But we can still distinguish a sacred object from one that is not sacred.
A sacred object is designed to take a person into a different mental plane than the one they occupy the vast majority of the time. The object might be better or worse in its design for this purpose, but it is imbued with meaning through the transmittal of information about what it is supposed to mean.
I suppose some objects have this property without much transmittal. A setting son, for example, or even a freshly born baby. But no one would know what the cross of Jesus symbolized unless you explained it to them.
Once you explain it, however, the object then takes on additional properties. These aren’t magical properties that defy physics, but real properties that operate on the brain to take people to a place of more profundity than they typically experience.
Therefore, an object that has taken on this kind of additional significance for enough people can get the kind of reverence that makes people protective.
Don’t put that crucifix in a jar of urine, you animal!!
Now the object has moved from being sacred in the meaningful sense to being sacred in the narrow sense.
Similarly, the absence of a ritual can be a sacred ritual than then become sacred in the narrow sense.
Not depicting God or Mohammed in art is an act of negation, like Lent. It’s an act of sacrifice, really. People want to depict God and Mohammed. Refraining from doing so creates discipline and mindfulness.
But now if someone comes along and violates the rule, people miss the entire point by screaming about the profaneness of it. The point isn’t that doing the drawings will make God angry but that restraining yourself will give you more self-control and demonstrate your commitment and sincerity.
What other people do or don’t do is their problem, ultimately, but these things don’t work (catch on) unless the high priests put consequences on them, right?
My sense of the prohibition on drawings of the prophet is so that we don’t worship him as if he were God. It’s encouraged that one studies his teachings and even connects to his spirit, but only to be guided toward God. One has to be careful not to turn him into a graven image, a God substitute, a form of addiction. God is beyond names and faces, beyond the ability of the mind to comprehend. That’s not true of a person. The same would be said of all the great spiritual masters.
In my view, each religion is like a channel. A Jew may more easily connect to God through Jewish teachings or through the spirit of Moses or David than through Jesus or Muhammed. That doesn’t mean one great master is greater than another. Each had special qualities, just as each of us carries special qualities. But ultimately religion isn’t about focusing on the qualities of people but rather drawing close to that which carries all qualities. Then we can see aspects of God revealed through each person we meet because each of us carries those qualities with which we’ve been blessed.
And if I had re-read the post I’d have noticed he is implying such a broad definition. So you’re right to take exception.
Who didn’t get their start by looking up at a clear night sky and experiencing a mysterium tremendum and a mysterium fascinans.
The clear night sky, spread across infinity with a splash of ancient lights, is sacred. Why else is light pollution such an abomination?
Interesting thread. I may be jumping to a false observation here but it looks like everyone’s taking a look at the question of ‘sacred’ from a religious perspective.
On the other hand, curiosity and investigation are integrally sacred parts of a scientific mind. Curiosity to figure out the hows and whys take up the whole journey and perhaps it could be said that the author views sacred as more of a challenge to overcome. To him, the challenge of the puzzle is what rewards what others may define as sacred because it gets him to that…place?
Definitions of words are very important, so I’ll start with my definition of sacred so that everyone else knows what I mean, and we don’t just become walls to each other.
Sacred means that “some concept shouldn’t be violated”.
Whatever the concept (marriage, pregnancy/abortion, mathematics, whatever) is, the individual who feels that it is sacred has an idea of what the sacred concept is, and how the sacred concept can be violated, or denigrated by someone else.
The problem, of course, is that what is sacred to me, or someone else, can be totally different to anyone else. Which is why there will literally never be agreement on what is sacred, never mind what sacred means. Because if you feel that secular, abstract concepts can be sacred, then your very idea of what is sacred is sacred, TO YOU.
Semantics is fun, but this is pretty much just a philosophy exercise where everyone has a different idea, no matter how similar, to what sacred is or isn’t, and what it means.
For me, the only thing that is truly sacred is my very mind. It is me. My collection of neurons, neuronal connections, DNA/genes, and the expression of those genes in my environment, makes up me. Without me, nothing else exists, to me. It doesn’t matter that the world span for a few billion years without me, or will continue to spin for a few billion more after I die.
I am sacred, in the sense that there is just me, and everything else. This is an expression of EGO, sure, but there it is.
Now, I truly believe that although I am (my mind) the only thing that for sure exists, everything else is a part of me, which means that I am a part of you.
Without going beyond the scope of this post, my view is that we’re all the same life. Looking at the universe as a whole, we are part of it the same way atoms, molecules, planets, and stars are a part of the universe. Those pieces of the universe aren’t separated from it, or outside of it. And neither are we. In fact, we’re really, really small parts of the universe that are very, very complicated. We’re so complicated, that ultimately we’re just little pieces of the universe that are self-aware. In essence, you, me, your cousin, some redneck moron down the street, are all the universe at the same time, with different vantage points of the universe itself. There is no real separation between you and me, except for our particular relative positions. I’m here in Atlanta, others are in Ohio, and by the very fact that your eyes can’t be in the same exact space as my eyes, we view the universe/our reality differently, with different view points and different ideas about it, but we’re just looking at ourselves/the universe.
The EGO is what allows us to separate ourselves into different individuals, but really, from a macro view of the universe, all life is just very tiny, complicated pieces the universe, looking at itself. Seriously.
So, my mind is sacred. So is yours. We’re sacred because we are the universe, self-aware of itself. Non-life is not sacred, so as beautiful as a mountain is, or important as it is, the mountain itself isn’t sacred, because it can’t observe itself, or observe other things. It’s just there, much as a star is just there. Sure, we’re a part of it, but our minds are the most unique thing in the universe that allow us to even know that we/the universe is here.
Our self-awareness, consciousness, makes all of us Gods in the classical sense, in that we aren’t just subjects, but actors. And much like early Gods had different powers, different ranks, and lots of drama, so do we. Greek Gods, for example, were just glorified humans with extraordinary powers.
But notice, that the more consciousness/self-awareness/understanding/knowledge that we acquire, the more powers that we have. Flying was the purview of the Gods. But we fly now, no problem. Travelling through space, seeing through time, control over elements. I mean, the more realisticly you look at ourselves and our technology/science/understanding/knowledge, the more you see how we’re in essence becoming just like the Greek Gods, with both immense power, and silly drama.
So, to finish this long, drawn-out post out, our minds are sacred and should not be violated (by violated I mean impeded upon by others, which for instance outlawing drugs that change your consciousness impedes and violates our minds). Our minds are the parts of the universe, the parts of all of us (which again I view as really just being one thing) that are self-aware and allow us/the universe to see itself and act. Our minds make us Gods/God.
Shit, imagine if we do make real Artificial Intelligence, and find a way to extend our lives for hundreds/thousands of years. To some extent, we’re even fitting the definition of God that Judaism/Christianity/Islam currently define. We create life and existence, and have almost limitless power.
And meaning to life? Knowledge/Understand. Pure and simple. To me, the more knowledge we have of ourselves/the universe, the more conscious we get. Which of course increases just how sacred our minds are, as knowledge=consciousness=understanding=power=control.
Religion? Bronze-age sheep herders limited attempt at a explaining the universee, period. If you wish to live your life by their morality stories, I don’t really care…as long as you don’t impede on my sacred mind to do it.
So there’s that.
Your ideas are interesting and worthwhile.
Thanks for sharing them.
I don’t agree with your idea of the sacred at all, and let me tell you why.
You interpret sacred as being something that must not be questioned or something that is worthy of special protections that don’t apply to other things.
It’s true that this is one common usage of that term, but it doesn’t do fuck-all to explain what sacred objects and texts actually do, why they exist, why people care about them, or even why anyone might want to protect them.
For me, ideas that have more explanatory power are preferable to ideas that tend to just draw lines and shut off debate.
I’ve touched on these things in several other comments in this thread, so I’d encourage you to peruse what I’ve already written.
I’ll take a slightly different angle here so as to be more responsive to what you’ve just written.
There are many things that are considered sacred by large numbers of people, and many more that have been in the past. Mt. Everest is sacred to the Nepalese and Mt.
McKinleyDenali is sacred to many native people in Alaska. Some Native Americans consider albino bison to be sacred. I don’t think you really want to tell these people that they’ve simply misunderstood what sacredness is.What these things all have in common with rituals like prayer and marriage and baptism and self-abnegation is that contemplating them or going through the ritualistic motions will lead one to a different mental plane than the ordinary ones we live with day in and day out.
In most cases, this will lead us to behave differently, at least for a time. In some cases, it will do little more than make us feel better. Edification is a major component, and the ability to effect changes in behavior is the primary evolutionary explanation for them. It’s easier to convince someone not to steal with a well-formed myth than it is by simple argument or threats. Likewise with murder, adultery, and so on.
The sacred exists primarily to protect people from other people rather than to protect some dogma, but it isn’t correct to see this as entirely cynical and manipulative precisely because being a better person is its own reward. The sacred invites people to change. That’s the biggest thing, whether you’re reading the Bible or consulting the Delphic Oracle or just thinking about yourself and your position in the universe. In marriage, it invites you to be monogamous and to care for someone else even if misfortune should befall them. These are things people might not ordinarily do, but by injected a sacred component into it, you increase the chances that they will.
And, most of the time, they’ll be a better person if they take those vows seriously. They’ll be better off. They’ll be happier. This kind of coercion is beneficial in the aggregate, and it’s much less coercive than telling someone that they have to believe some passage in the Bible.
The Bible is sacred, too, of course, but not because it is inviolate. It’s because it exhorts people constantly to change and has the power to make them change.
But the Bible is less powerful, ultimately, than other rituals. In fact, you’ll probably get more personal transformation out of reading the Bible if you do it compulsively on a certain schedule than you will by interpreting what you read. That’s because the brain changes through rote repetition, so you’ll do better getting your teenager to become productive by forcing him to get up and make his bed everyday than by arguing with him about his grades.
I’m making the sacred sound pretty utilitarian, which it is. But it’s more than that. It’s the way that we use the objects in the world to fundamentally change what’s going on inside of us. The hope is that we do this for the better, but this by no means always the case.
Another way of looking at this is that there are things that are sacred but you cannot understand their sacredness without going inside the heads of the people who revere those objects and rituals. There isn’t any magic involved, but because the causality is going on inside someone’s brain where it can’t be examined easily, it can seem like magic.
Take someone who is just slamming dope into their arms and no one can get them to stop no matter how bad things get for them. Their loved ones will talk about needing a miracle, but what’s required is actually for a light-bulb to go on in their head that makes it possible for them to stop. Sacred rituals, myths, and objects are some of the most effective ways known to man to get that light-bulb to go off. Other ones are the threat of death or prison.
Not everything is sacred, after all.
You can talk about the sacred in this kind of mundane way, but it actually encompasses people’s spiritual lives. It’s kind of the portal between the mental and the objective world. You can take an object in the real world and use it to change your thinking, which will change your behavior, which will change your thinking again, which will change the world around you.
So, whether it’s some priestly caste telling you that you have to do some ritual or its you doing your own invented thing to make yourself feel “right,” the sacred has always existed, always been necessary, and always been real.
Only insofar as that some of these rituals and beliefs have been codified or made compulsory have they become sacred cows rather than simply sacred practices.
“The sacred exists primarily to protect people from other people rather than to protect some dogma, but it isn’t correct to see this as entirely cynical and manipulative precisely because being a better person is its own reward. The sacred invites people to change. That’s the biggest thing, whether you’re reading the Bible or consulting the Delphic Oracle or just thinking about yourself and your position in the universe. In marriage, it invites you to be monogamous and to care for someone else even if misfortune should befall them. These are things people might not ordinarily do, but by injected a sacred component into it, you increase the chances that they will.”
Well, I guess I see this as more of a result of holding something to be sacred. Holding something to be sacred usually results in a certain feeling about that thing.
I won’t tell you that you can’t find a mountain, cow, or book sacred. Especially if you are using the definition of sacred that I am using.
So, again, this is all semantic.
But, I can tell you: My mind is sacred, in the sense that you should not be allowed to alter it against my will, or prevent me from altering it how I wish. My mind is me, and is literally the only thing that encompasses me. It also applies to your mind, meaning that I should be prohibited from altering your mind against your will, or stopping you from altering your mind how you wish.
Which also means that I’m not going to tell a Hindu that cows aren’t sacred. He or she is perfectly able to hold cows to be sacred. But I’ll eat beef. I don’t hold it to be sacred.
My definition of sacred, which means “shouldn’t be violated”, can only be applied 100% of the time, IMHO, to a person’s mind. Everything else is open to interpretation. The sacred can be almost anything under and including the sun, depending on the individual.
So, marriage can be sacred to some people, and just an institution to others. I won’t tell one person that they’re wrong to think of it as sacred, because it can be to that person. Or lots of people. Or everyone except for me.
It’s just that I find self-awareness, knowledge, consciousness, etc, to be the prime characteristic of human beings. Which allows me to respect everyone else’s opinion on what is sacred and what sacred means. So, I don’t disagree with what you think sacred means and how it affects people. My own view of being one with the universe, and everything in the universe being one with me means that I am relatively spiritual, although I’m a born again agnostic. But again, the spiritual feeling that I get I believe comes from my belief/understanding of the universe and how my mind isn’t separate from it, but a part of it.
I tend to boil things down to their base. Trees are great, but I like to see the entire forest before I worry too much about any individual tree. For me, that includes my “oneness with everything” belief, and that boiled down, means that the only thing I know is 100% sacred, using my definition, is my mind (and by extension, everyone else’s).
I’m not excluding anything from being sacred, I’m simply using a specific definition that I provided ahead of time, and applying it to the one thing that is definitely sacred, whereas there can be many other things that are sacred, even for me.
Or, I don’t think you disagree with me, because to even find something sacred to begin with requires that you have a mind in which to hold something sacred. You just start off by applying it to a lot more things, whereas I’m more concerned about making sure that my mind isn’t violated, with everything else being debatable.
You can have a prohibition against eating something because it is revered or reviled, but the result is still sacrifice which leads to mindfulness and proves commitment.
Both are equally ways towards the sacred, although only the revered animal is “sacred” in the positive (usual) sense.
Here’s where we agree and it helps to explain why we disagree.
The mind is where the sacred resides or is actually located. An object or ritual is merely a way of getting the mind to change its perspective and focus on more spiritual matters. So, it’s true that you can’t have anything sacred without the mind, and since it’s an essential component it could qualify as sacred too, or even the most sacred object.
But, on the other hand, this is redundant and superfluous and explains virtually nothing.
When we talk about sacred things, we’re talking about actions and objects that act on the mind, and change the mind.
And the point isn’t really about the details of the ritual or the characteristics of the object. It’s the fact that rituals and objects are used in this way by human beings and always have been.
What we’re interested in is not the thing or practice in the outside world but what it does to the inside world and how that transforms people and ultimately comes back to transform the outside world.
A huge gothic cathedral is a sacred object that causes one to feel small and awed, which prepares your mind for spiritual thinking. Rosary beads are more of a tactile prompt for spiritual thinking. Frankincense is a olfactory prompt. Chanting is an auditory prompt. These are all ways to approach the sacred realm.
Whether people get pissed off if you disrespect these things or not is really not very important for understanding why they exist and what they can do.
And they actually do things (actually, cause things to be done), which is why sacred things aren’t just fake mythical ineffectual delusions.
Masjid al-Ḥarām, the Sacred Mosque, the Grand Mosque, or Great Mosque in Mecca.
In preparation for the annual tourist bonanza: Dozens killed as crane crashes in Grand Mosque in Mecca.