Another installment of Heathen’s Progress. It starts with prayer and then generalizes to religious ritual compared to secular ritual.
I’ve recently started praying. Well, not exactly praying, but doing something that fulfils what I think are its main functions. Prayer provides an opportunity to remind oneself of how one should be living, our responsibilities to others, our own failings, and our relative good fortune, should we have it. This is, I think, a pretty worthwhile practice and it is not something you can only do if you believe you are talking to an unseen creator. Many stoics did something similar and some forms of meditation serve the same kind of purpose. My version is simply a few minutes of quiet reflection on such matters each morning.
I don’t see why that should be called prayer at all. It looks to me like thinking, which is not the same thing. Reflection is more like thinking than it’s like prayer, and adding “quiet” doesn’t make it more like prayer. Thinking generally is quiet.
Prayer, after all, is a form of asking. “I pray you” is an archaic way of saying I ask you, I beg you, I beseech you. It’s not a way of saying I quiet-reflect you.
Maybe Julian thinks it’s like prayer because he does it each morning, so that makes it prayer-like. But it could also make it brushing the teeth-like or putting on the trousers-like. But those are comparatively noisy; maybe it’s the combination of quiet and each morning. But then pausing to figure out where you left your keys/homework/bus pass would be prayer-like.
I’m being mean. Ok, I am being mean, but that’s because I don’t much like this solemn attempt to sanctify (as it were) an entirely secular activity.
I do think that prayer, like many rituals, is something that the religious get some real benefits from that are just lost to us heathens. One reason is that many of these rituals are performed communally, as part of a regular meeting or worship. This means there is social reinforcement. But the main one is that the religious context transforms them from something optional and arbitrary into something necessary and grounded. Because the rituals are a duty to our absolute sovereign, there is strong reason to keep them up. You pray every day because you sense you really ought to, and it will be noticed if you don’t. In contrast, the belief that daily meditation is beneficial motivates in much the same way as the thought that eating more vegetables or exercising is. Inclination comes and goes and needs to be constantly renewed.
Yes but that idea is also one of the most dangerous and oppressive ideas that humans have come up with. Yes it can be good for good people, in helping them stay motivated, but it’s a nightmare in the hands of ungood people. Julian knows this of course, but he fails to mention it.
He goes on to say that it’s difficult to replace religious rituals with secular ones because they don’t have the same kind of automatic justification, so it all feels a bit forced and fake. I agree with that, and once wrote a Comment is Free piece (answering CiF Belief’s question of the week) saying much the same thing:
There are several candidates for least-possible-to-replace aspect of religion. For most varieties the obvious one is the object of worship – the god or gods. If you subtract god or gods and leave the ceremonies and meetings and rules, you seem to be left with something very arbitrary and random. “Why are we doing this when we don’t think God is participating?” Secular pseudo-religion strikes me as not just hopeless but also faintly nauseating. I’m not about to sit in a circle holding hands, or worship The Principle of Humanity, or put a list of Affirmations on the wall.
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The sad thing about this is that church is, among other things, a way to get together with other people and focus the mind on being good. The religious version of being good is not always on the mark, to put it mildly, but even the opportunity to contemplate goodness seems valuable. This is something it’s truly hard to reproduce with secular institutions. Politics seems like the closest thing to a substitute, and it’s not a very close match.
This could in theory be something humanist groups could attempt, but in reality the idea seems hopeless. Why? I suppose because it’s like the proverbial herding of cats. Who would deliver the sermon? I don’t want to go sit in a pew and listen to some secular sermon, and I doubt many other people do either. We’re used to the idea of a cleric standing up and lecturing people about some facet of being good; we’re not used to the idea of anyone else doing that. Habituation explains a lot. I don’t think clerics have any special expertise in moral matters; on the contrary; but I do realise that they at least have practice in talking about them. How useful this is depends very heavily on the quality of their moral views: lectures on the duty of women to be obedient and the duty of men to enforce obedience are not helpful, for instance; but the habit of focusing on morality, at least, seems in some ways enviable.
I can get quite melancholy, sometimes, thinking about this. But then – there is no obvious easy replacement for a weekly sermon on being good, but there is also no obvious easy replacement for the belief in eternal torment. Swings and roundabouts.
I think Julian neglected the roundabouts.
Prayer provides an opportunity to remind oneself of how one should be living, our responsibilities to others, our own failings, and our relative good fortune, should we have it.
I wonder which part of Hail Mary resembles the above. Its this sort of semi-dishonest game that gets irritating. If you want to define Prayer to be this – fine. And if you want to say this sort of Prayer is good – fine.
But when the religious person takes this to mean that his type of “prayer” – i.e. his praise the lord and the lord’s mother and saints and aunts is also good and useful and able to heal people and should be recited in schools then all Julian has succeeded in is making the English language worse than it is – and aligning himself with people he probably disagrees with.
Perhaps he needs another survey to figure out how many people think this is the only purpose of prayer or indeed its chief purpose.
I forgot to point out the “provides an opportunity” bit. Of course it provides an opportunity for doing all kinds of things. So does sitting on the bus or standing in the supermarket checkout line or walking in the park or staring out the window. But as you say, Deepak, Julian’s version certainly isn’t what is generally meant by “prayer.”
Julian should read Franny and Zooey again, or for the first time.
Excellent response to Julian’s latest. It’s so wrong in so many ways. Because, as you say, he’s trying to transform something secular into a faint reflection of something religious, when it’s really something else. Because he misses the roundabouts, and suggests that something is good just because he thinks it may be useful — at least he finds a bit of quiet reflection (thinking, as you say) helpful in the morning, because it helps to focus the mind; but forgets that focusing the mind being good depends on what it’s focused on.
I think both you and he are wrong about asking. That’s certainly part of it, but it’s not the emphasis of what is supposed to be Christian prayer, at least, nor of Muslim prayer or Jewish prayer either, I should think, despite the etymology of ‘pray’. Muslim prayer is most obviously a submission to the will of god, no matter what, and this is borne out in the fatalism of a good deal of Islam. But the Christian is also taught to say, “Thy will be done.”
As for being mean, I think that’s in order about this time, since Baggini tries so sedulously to back out of the conclusions that his own exploration has brought him to. I think it’s a bit dishonest of him, really, basically to come to “new atheist” conclusions and then to back away from them so quickly, without letting on that this is what he’s doing. Well, he says, we pay a price for our disbelief, and then proposes that it might be worthwhile to playact a bit, and pretend. (Perhaps he has De Botton’s new potboiler in mind.) That’s contemptible, to my mind, and Baggini is playing games, not doing serious philosophy about this at all, and he should know better.
Alas, this seems to be the role he’s chosen for himself – to be some kind of universal expert, qualified by “philosophy” to impart wisdom on every possible subject. I think it’s a mistake – it’s too diffuse and kind of boneless.
I don’t think I understand the purpose of taking “reflection” and trying to force it into the mold of “prayer” in a way that many atheists will find distasteful, while also redefining “prayer” in such a way that religious people will barely recognize it and not have much use for it either.
Some people like motorcycles, some people prefer cars. The answer is not taking the left-hand tires off a car and then putting a shit-ton of weights on the right-hand side to keep the car from tipping over.
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… yes, “wacky analogy” is today’s theme. So?
We heathens may be proud that we have refused to sell off our reason to pay the unacceptably high price of faith. But we should admit that as a consequence, others are enjoying the rewards of their purchase while we have to make and mend do with alternatives that are adequate, better in some ways, but very possibly inferior overall.
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Two bits from “Atheism, A Very Short Introduction”:
[Re Don Cupitt] I think his attempt to save something distinctive from the wreckage of religious belief is admirable and has lessons for atheists and believers alike. (p. 108-9)
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Atheism is about moving on and taking the opportunities that life affords, and that carries with it risks of failurew and the rejection of reassuring illusions.
It is this realism that means atheism cannot ever be presented as an undiluted, positive joy. (p.111)
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I think that Mr Baggini’s problem is that his sympathy for the emotional needs of religious people is leading him astray, that he knows this, but he seems stuck with it. He sees the comfort of prayer, of ritual, of a life ordered by an ultimate given, and he also sees the appalling cost of that comfort and order…but it’s the comfort and order that stick in his mind. Basically, he’s dithering: longing for something he knows isn’t real. Hence the inconsistency.
I would call this “self-awareness”, and I try to engage in it more often than just once a day.
Yes, or “self-centring” or some such. A “reality check”, perhaps (if I’m using the phrase correctly). I imagine that some believers use prayer this way, though I think that for many it’s more a matter of “measuring up”. Not so good.
Eric:
“I think both you and he are wrong about asking. That’s certainly part of it, but it’s not the emphasis of what is *supposed* to be Christian prayer”
I completely disagree. Christian prayer is *all* about the asking. Asking for forgiveness much of the time but more usually asking for a good parking spot or for god to smite the other team. Or perhaps most commonly asking for god to somehow validate the prayer’s own personal bigotry.
Having been a Catholic from a young age through to my early teens, I can assure you that Mr. Baggini has it wrong. Praying is indeed asking, begging, beseeching. If there is a portion in which one reminds someone of how one should be living, our responsibilities to others, our own failings, and our relative good fortune, it’s in the context of bargaining, and that part requires another actor with whom one can bargain, as in “Dear God, please let X happen. (In return) I’ve done Y and refrained from Z. I acknowledge that I’ve been granted U and V (so please don’t use ingratitude as an excuse to deny me this request). Amen.”
(I’m also very familiar with the process that Julian describes, “remind[ing] oneself of how one should be living, our responsibilities to others, our own failings”, as that constant barrage of mental, internal self-criticism is a technique I learned at a young age and is the primary non-organic cause of my on-going depression, but I digress.)
The mental process he’s talking about sounds much more akin to meditation, and he should be more cautious about the terminology he uses.
After all, there are many processes that include “remind[ing] someone of how one should be living, one’s responsibilities to others, one’s own failings, and one’s relative good fortune”, but I don’t imagine Julian’s next piece will begin with “I’ve recently started conducting semi-annual performance reviews” or “I’ve recently started doing my taxes” and then launch into an incautious and waffly discussion of how those of us who are self- or underemployed or non-accountants have lost an important aspect of life practice and self-discovery.
The posture Muslims adopt on the prayer mat is something akin to a yogic stretch. I googled ‘Islam and Yoga’ once, and found a Muslim site which extolled the benefits of prayer for bodily health, given the posture adopted and relaxed into.
Christians in my experience simply kneel in their pews: clearly an act of submission (to the church, divine will…?), but of little benefit physically.
All prayers are an attempt on the part of believers to change God’s mind, or to draw something to his (omniscient) attention. But the phrase “thy will be done” has for a long time struck me as ridiculous. They might as well pray “do what you want to do. Or are you so stupid as to not know your own mind?”
The group talks to itself, and worships itself.
Sure, in formulaic prayers like the Our Father or Hail Mary, or possibly free-form Grace, but even those cases aren’t, unlike what Julian describes, independent of a deity.
Though that might be a good bit for a future Coen brothers’ film:
Prayerful atheist: “Thy will be done. Amen.”
Observer: “Thy?”
Prayerful atheist (startled): “The Royal ‘Thy’! You know, the editorial…”
[laughing at Joe’s analogy]
Aw that’s brilliant!
You peeps are on fire today.
In the alt-med/health community, especially among those interested in Eastern practices, there’s a lot of belief in the correlation between body position and feelings of spirituality. I recall there being mention of a cross-cultural study that examined, for instance, Islamic prayer positions and subjective experience (one position created feelings of wonder, another a feeling of connectedness, or something like that for example) in The Way of Qigong by Kenneth Cohen. I was never able to find the original study, but that was a long time ago and I probably didn’t search very exhaustively.
Julian Baggini: “I’ve recently started praying… Many stoics did something similar and some forms of meditation serve the same kind of purpose. My version is simply a few minutes of quiet reflection on such matters each morning.”
JB’s use of the word ‘meditation’ here clearly implies the Christian sense. The ‘such matters’ are “…how one should be living, … responsibilities to others, … own failings, … our relative good fortune,… [etc].
Nothing intrinsically wrong with that. But ‘reflecting on’ means ‘thinking about’; nothing more.
In many if not most of the Eastern traditons, ‘meditation’ means exactly the opposite. It means not thinking; emptying the mind of the ‘monkey chatter’ so easily slipped into; seeking internal stillness or serenity. This practice has found its way into many of the Japanese and other martial arts, via Zen, which as far as I am aware, got it from India.
Christians in my experience simply kneel in their pews: clearly an act of submission (to the church, divine will…?), but of little benefit physically.
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Christians kneel as to a king (the King of Glory) — yes, it’s an act of submission. It was never intended that believers should do it for their health. It’s about self-abasement.
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All prayers are an attempt on the part of believers to change God’s mind, or to draw something to his (omniscient) attention.
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Absolutely true.
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But the phrase “thy will be done” has for a long time struck me as ridiculous.
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No, you miss the point here. God’s will is the ultimate power by which the entire universe is sustained. His will is what keeps it in being. Therefore, his will is the guarantee that all is as it should be, and the believer submits to that in full acceptance that prayers may not be answered (back to submission…).
Brownian:
Sorry. Cross-post.
But noted.
Gordon Willis:
“God’s will is the ultimate power by which the entire universe is sustained. His will is what keeps it in being. Therefore, his will is the guarantee that all is as it should be, and the believer submits to that in full acceptance that prayers may not be answered (back to submission…).”
I don’t recall reading that anywhere in the Bible. I’m just going by Matthew 6:9-13.
😉
No need to apologise, Ian (and I’m not sure what you’re apologising for).
Great point. My limited experience of Buddhism (through martial art) is much more consistent with your description than Julian’s. So, may be he doesn’t mean meditation at all.
Given all of this discussion, his first sentence seems to me increasingly inaccurate in consideration of his subsequent ones. He should have begun his piece with,
“I’ve recently started having Catholic guilt.”
Ian, speaking as an ex-christian, not all christianity is of the “biblical” variety, which, after all, didn’t exist before the Reformation. My background is in Thomas a Kempis, Julian of Norwich, Brother Lawrence (“The Practice of the Presence of God”), Meister Eckhart, and so on — basically, old-fashioned Anglican with Catholic bits. The modern sort of biblical christianity is not just a product of the Reformation: it’s something made in America.
our relative good fortune, should we have it.
Did anybody else read this and have the Hitchhiker’s Guide go thru their head?
What to do if you find yourself stuck with no hope of rescue: Consider yourself lucky that life has been good to you so far. Alternatively, if life hasn’t been good to you so far, which given your present circumstances seems more likely, consider yourself lucky that it won’t be troubling you much longer.
Yeah, back on topic. Just say meditation. What’s wrong with that word? It actually is secular, it doesn’t have to be twisted to make it so, and fundies probably won’t attempt to take it back from a secular meaning. I mean, I tend to really hate it when religious co-opt secular language, why should the atheist community do the exact same thing when there are better, more accurate, more universal words already in use. Meditation. If he needs a fallacy of authority, I’ve known about Sam Harris being on the meditation bandwagon since he came on the scene. It’s ok, you don’t have to chant “om”, and it doesn’t make you Buddhist.
Self-reflection is in the same boat as asking for shit from your imaginary friend, if trying to cook a new and flavorful dish for enjoyment and personal growth is in the same boat as ordering a number from McDonald’s value menu.
No, no, Julian’s right. Then, after we’ve all started, er, ‘praying’, we Canadians can campaign to add “In God We Trust” to our money. Well, not exactly God, but something that fulfils what I think are its main functions. Trusting in God provides an opportunity to express the somewhat existential feeling that the universe will proceed as it always has with or without us, and we needn’t worry too much about it while we’re here. This is, I think, a pretty worthwhile practice and it is not something you can only do if you believe you are trusting an unseen creator.
There’s no way this won’t cause more problems than it fixes!
Ian, thinking about it, I suppose that the loci classici of this idea is Matthew 26:42
“And he went away again the second time, and prayed, saying, Father, if this cup may not pass away from me, except I drink it, thy will be done.”
and (amongst many others) Psalm 96:10
“it is he who hath made the round world so fast that it cannot be moved” (and lots of other bits about God as creator).
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Christianity was originally an interplay between Jewish tradition, doctrine and scripture, and (quite certainly) Greek philosophy. The christian bible is rather faute de mieux and has always required exegesis in the light of Christian doctrine: at least, it did till the Reformation literalists came along. I mean, originally, christian doctrine was prior to the texts, and the texts as they now stand were only ratified in the 4th century, and without universal agreement. The Emperor Constantine insisted, so something had to be sorted out. So tradition and exegesis have always been fundamental to christianity. The biblical (literalist) idea was originally seen as a heresy.
@Gordon Willis
I think that Mr Baggini’s problem is that his sympathy for the emotional needs of religious people is leading him astray, that he knows this, but he seems stuck with it. He sees the comfort of prayer, of ritual, of a life ordered by an ultimate given,
Thats interesting.
Ages ago , my grandmother was seriously ill – I prayed to every God I knew (and Hindu’s know quite a few) – and it gave me comfort.
Years later, it was my aunt – This time I couldn’t bring myself to pray (even with a whats the harm reasoning) and I spent the time thinking of good memories I had of my aunt.
I can’t say which was better or worse , nor can I say which gave me more comfort or which satisfied my emotional needs.
I don’t think Julian can either.
Gordon:
Yes. What you say at #24 ties in with my experience of Protestantism, particularly Anglicanism. It always struck me as odd that the various sermons by parsons I sat through never ever referred to pre-Reformation church history. It was effectively airbrushed out of existence, and replaced with a dreary evangelicalism, with major emphasis on the writings of St Paul. This came at the expense of time devoted to the Gospels. Also often enough in contradiction with them.
Christianity went through a formative period up to the death of St Paul, then through a vacuum lasting more than 1,000 years, only to reappear in need of reformation around Luther’s time.
However, I read somewhere that for a long time one of the books on the Papal Index was the Bible itself. Catholics were directed to let the clergy read it and interpret it for them. No doubt lest their own readings lead them astray.
If he wants to practice Stoicism, then he can take out his Epictetus or Musonius Rufus or Martha Nussbaum or Admiral James Stockdale and follow their advice, because prayer it ain’t. ‘Mindfulness’ is much closer to what he’s describing, and is sibling under the skin to meditation in Buddhism and Taoism (as people have already noticed).
It is very irritating when people who operate out of a monotheistic tradition–even once they have abandoned it–continue to believe that every other religious tradition is the same as theirs.
Ian, I think the need for Reformation was partly in response to ecclesiastical corruption (badly supervised monasteries and nunneries seen as hotbeds of fornication and ignorance, the sale of Indulgencies, you name it) and the superstitious belief in “holy writ” as some ultimate truth jealously concealed by a corrupt clergy. As I understand it, originally the christian idea was an amalgam of Jewish tradition and Greek philosophy (especially Platonism and Stoicism) under the influence of the pagan mystery religions that swamped the Eastern Empire from about the first century BC — I mean, it grew out of ideas that were going around at the time. So theology is prior to scripture: a way (at most) of understanding scripture, in the light of new ideas. As Meister Eckhart shows, there were always ways for individual preachers to expound scripture in the light of christian theology, not the other way round. The new literalists similarly impose their theology on the scriptures, and therefore have to choose their texts carefully. Their problem is that believing that every word is literally true has a retroflective impact on their theology, which imposes an impossible burden by causing them to spend fruitless hours explaining away the passages they (or their critics) don’t like. This drags them deeper and deeper into vice, as William Lane Craig shows when he tries to justify genocide. However, this tendency has always been a problem: it isn’t just a product of the Reformation.
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To get back to Julian Baggini, I think that he is sympathetic to the theological aspect of christianity, and cares for the plight of the beleaguered believer as a seeker after theological truth and comfort — where “theological” is essentially existential: about us, about our relationship with the (externalised) foundation of our being, about our need for reassurance, for survival, and so on. And he doesn’t see any such reassurance in an atheistic outlook. Perhaps he is right, perhaps this existential anxiety is a given, but it seems to me that in a world where people are focussed differently, that particular anxiety is less likely to arise, and the present focus is primarily the fault of religion, if only because religion encourages it.
Baggini says:
“I do think that prayer, like many rituals, is something that the religious get some real benefits from that are just lost to us heathens. One reason is that many of these rituals are performed communally, as part of a regular meeting or worship. This means there is social reinforcement.”
At charismatic groups that I attended in the past whilst residing in Victoria, London, prayers were often done by speaking in a foreign tongue, a practice now known as glossolalia. Practitioners of glossolalia may claim that the languages they speak in prayer are real foreign languages, and that the ability to speak those languages spontaneously is a gift of the Holy Spirit. However, many people outside the movement have offered alternative views. George Barton Cutten suggested that glossolalia was a sign of mental illness. Felicitas Goodman suggested that tongue speakers were under a form of hypnosis. Others suggest that it is a learned behaviour. Some of these views have allegedly been refuted.
I went to the charismatic prayer group because I enjoyed playing the guitar and singing and for the comradeship. I did meet up with many other musicians and that was a real social reinforcement.They were the prayer — not the convoluted gibberish bellowing which came out of most mouths of otherwise very normal people. Speaking in tongues was considered much higher praying and all were called to this kind of prayer through the Holy Spirit via the gifts they received during Confirmation as teenagers, or when the converted to Catholicism. The speaking in tongues used to scare the life out of me. I didn’t consider the praying beneficial. It was during these times, when lots of the attendees were hyped up, that the laying on of hands were placed upon them by nuns and priests and the laity, who were specially chosen from a healing and prayer ministry group. The healers went into a frenzy of praying, so as to try to cure the emotional, psychological physical ailments of believers. They were the Holy Spirit’s proxies and were endowed with unique healing gifts. I knew of many very vulnerable people who went there especially to be prayed on for miraculous cures. Some of them were so damaged, when they discovered that the miracles were never realised. Where was the Holy Spirit after much invocation, wnen they most needed *him* they cried. I thank the Holy Spirit that I was never taken in by all the prayer tomfoolery. Now I must get back to a few minutes of quiet reflection by reading the psalms. They are prayers for ye to contemplate and get lost in translation.
My perspective is as a person raised as secular Jew and whose main exposure to religion was via Orthodox Jewish relatives and friends. To a Jew prayer is predominantly about fulfilling an obligation. It isn’t about self-expression or self-examination. A newlywed is required to say the same prayer as a bereaved person – both give thanks for the same things and ask for the same things (rain in its season, peace, the resurrection of the dead and a few other things). They learn how to pray when they are about 3 and repeat it 3 times a day – if you watch an Orthodox Jew praying alone mostly you’ll see quick mumbling. There probably is benefit from a predictable ritual that is repeated regularly – like kids relieve anxiety by doing regular activities exactly the same way each time – and it doesn’t matter what the ritual is. It works with prayer not because the devout believe it is demanded by the Almighty but because prayer is a habit they acquired early in life, at an age when ritualized behavior is common, and it becomes a source of comfort and a way to relieve anxiety.
How could you possibly ignore the Royal Society for Putting Things On Top Of Other Things?!!?!?!?!
Bwahahahahahahahahahaha
Of course all the gnu-haters will be thinking “gnus!” and all the bitchers and cunters will be thinking “women who don’t like being called bitches and cunts!”
Gordon @ #28:
A most informative post, with much food for thought.
Many thanks for that.