What If It's Not About Belief? Part II

All right, it's time to start digesting this can of worms I've opened, if I may mix metaphors disgustingly. I have a whole pile of notes made in preparation for this post, and a chunk of free time as I'm on vacation.

Unfortunately, I left the notes at home. So instead of a subtly winding and logically sound argument leading around and eventually to my main point, anticipating and responding to all possible objections along the way, I'm going to make this post more of an allegorical illustration of my position. Maybe that's a good thing. Long, highly theoretical rants can be pretty tiresome to read on a computer monitor, and I can only put off the pop music recommendations and Facebook-bashing for so long before my already dangerously hypothetical readership becomes a pure fiction.

Here then, is a simple statement of the main point I'm trying to make in this growing series of posts, along with an intuition pump that will hopefully draw out just what I mean by calling it "What If It's Not About Belief?" More formal argumentative details will have to wait for a later post.

My main point is this: the way we generally think about religious belief is wrong-headed. What it really is, or at least should be, is not actually "belief" at all, in the way we usually use that word. At most, it is actually belief within a certain mode of conscious experience, and if we want to talk about it as belief we have to also specify the mode in which that belief makes sense. And adding this specification turns out to make most of the arguments we have over religious belief disappear into meaninglessness, without thereby invalidating religious experience itself. It may, however, invalidate much of organized religion, which would probably be a very good thing.

Here's an allegory about the wrong-headed way we generally think about religious belief. Imagine that human culture evolved in such a way that we no longer slept. It's not that far-fetched. We already stay up a lot later than our predecessors did before electricity was invented, keeping ourselves awake now with artificial light and stimulating entertainments like television and weblogs, and offsetting the negative side effects of mild sleep deprivation with caffeine in the morning, thereby leading arguably richer and debatably more productive lives. We still need to get a certain amount of sleep or we start acting kind of insane — at least, more insane than our culture is currently willing to accept. But what if we found a way to override the insanity-producing effects of substantial sleep deprivation through medication?

A drug that allowed people to think and behave relatively sanely without requiring sleep at all anymore would, I'm sure, catch on very quickly as a good idea. Maybe we would still have to allow our bodies and minds some rest every once in awhile by sitting down and watching some really dumb TV shows. But we know that people would generally find this preferable to getting in bed and losing conscious contact with the world for a few hours, as this is a choice they already make in the real world, where sleep is still a necessity.

And once a few people started taking this new drug — call it Soma — their extra productivity and life experience would quickly become apparent. More and more people would be attracted to the Soma way of life, and our culture would change to reflect the new lifestyle. People would be able to work longer and different hours, and would also have more time that would need filling with entertainment. Products would get consumed faster because they would be used more often. Pretty much all production and consumption (with the possible exception of beds and pillows) would get ratcheted up, and soon it would become impossible to live in the culture without taking Soma. What started out as an advantage-creator would become a necessity, as such things do, and after a few generations people would forget what sleep was even like and what purpose it ever served.

Of course, they would have references to sleep and dreams in their ancient literature and television archives, but these would seem incredibly old-fashioned. The whole concept of lying down and doing nothing for a third of the day, and especially the idea that other worlds and life stories could thereby be directly experienced, would strike them as superstitious mumbo jumbo that had thankfully been done away with through rational thinking, enterprise, and pharmaceutical technology. There would be a certain small percentage of the population, the Sleepists, who would long for those bygone days and would actually try sleeping themselves by foregoing the Soma for awhile. They would come back to this world with stories of Dreamland and the wonderful, fantastic things that went on there, but their stories would generally be regarded as nonsense and the Sleepists themselves as some kind of deluded kooks. How, after all, could one be suddenly transported to some other world where anything could happen — including the logically impossible — merely by not taking a drug? The whole story just wouldn't make any sense, especially as it would be perfectly clear that these people were not actually going anywhere except into a special room with a soft horizontal surface, where they would close their eyes for a few hours.

If Sleepism caught on with enough people, they might gather together to defend themselves against the larger populace who viewed them with suspicion and bemusement. In talking with each other about their Dreamland experiences, they might start finding common threads which could be interpreted as messages and prophecies about this world. These would then gradually be incorporated into an entire Sleepist worldview, which could be documented, added to, and handed down over generations. Sleepism would become a whole belief system about the waking world, and not just the practice of sleeping as an interesting experience. There might even eventually be Sleepists who had never even experienced sleep themselves, but still subscribed to the belief system because it had been subscribed to by their parents and grandparents.

At some point, it would become necessary for the Somists to debate the Sleepists, in order to debunk their superstitious, antirational metaphysics. The messages received from Dreamland would contradict current scientific understanding of the world and sometimes even common sense. The Somists would see that if we were to continue as an intelligent species and not fall back into the dark days of witchcraft and acausal pseudoscience, Dreamland would have to be exposed as the ludicrous fantasy that it obviously was. Of course, it couldn't be proven not to exist, but because there would be no rational reason to believe in its existence in the first place, and because belief in its existence would seem to lead one to all sorts of unintuitive and even demonstrably false conclusions, the burden of proof would fall squarely on the Sleepists. They would of course have all sorts of stories about their own experiences and those of their forefathers, and how all of their lives had been enriched by sleep and its alleged realm, Dreamland. But these stories would convince no Somists, as no hard evidence could ever be found for Dreamland's existence.

And, to complicate matters further, there would even develop different factions of Sleepists, with different stories or different ways of interpreting the stories derived from their and their lineages' Dreamland experiences, and different ideas about the best ways to access Dreamland and what it requires of us when we arrive. These stories and ideas would all contradict each other in ways that would necessitate heated intraSleepist debate. Eventually, wars would ensue. And the ridiculous tragedy of such wars would be further evidence for the Somists that the whole sleep ball of wax was just a terrible idea that we would do best to put behind us, the sooner the better.

So that's where I see us standing today with regard to religious belief. I'm sure it's obvious, but just so I can't be accused of deliberate obscurantism, here's the analogy explicitly laid out:

sleep = religious/mystical state
dream = religious experience
Dreamland = heaven/God/nirvana/etc.
Soma = science/rationalism
Sleepism = organized religion
Somism = atheism
belief = belief