Truth Claims

My doorbell rang. I opened the door to find two middle-aged African-American ladies smiling at me. On a hunch I asked: “Are you Jehovah’s Witnesses?” They nodded in affirmation. I told them I wasn’t interested and they left immediately without any questions. Later, when I recounted this incident to a Nigerian friend (who happens to be a devout Protestant) he inquired: “Why? You don’t like Christians or Jehovah’s Witnesses?”

I replied: “I don’t like proselytizing.”

“Why,” he asked in a surprised way, “you don’t like people to convert?”

I said I had no problems with people wanting to convert, voluntarily. My friend agreed he did not like forced conversions either but he didn’t see what the problem was with “sharing wisdom with others.” His faith asked him to do so; therefore it was a good thing.

I explained how one person’s religious convictions could be annoying to another, especially when the expression of such unsolicited conviction contains an underlying agenda; I pointed out it could also appear condescending and offensive to a person of a different faith equally convinced of the superiority of his own religion. We did not have more time to continue talking so we left it there.

I sat down, collected my thoughts and began writing. Much of my own understanding is based on Ken Wilber’s work. I am forever indebted to him for giving me a language to validate and articulate my own spiritual experience and place it within a meaningful epistemological context.

Reality Testing in Two Domains:

EXTERIOR:

Proposition: The color of grass is violet.

How do you evaluate such a statement for truthfulness?
(Let us see where common sense gets us - I do not want to get into the technicalities of hypothesis-testing involving concepts such as falsifiability, null-hypothesis, statistical significance and the like.)

1. You set it up against the popular idea – grass is green – the proposition fails
     If there is continued insistence grass is violet what do you do?

2. You point to actual green grass. If your color is rejected you move to 3

3. Call on other people to corroborate ‘grass is green’ – what if the proponent of the ‘grass is violet’ idea believes your corroborators are delusional?

4. Find documentary evidence (photographs, paintings, films) where grass appears as green.

5. If 4 fails you could conclude the proponent is:
    a. from another geographical area where grass could be violet
    b. blind to the color green
    c. delusional (or in an altered state of consciousness)
    d. lying


INTERIOR:

Proposition: If you do not believe in Jesus Christ as your personal savior you will be condemned to eternal damnation.

This is when testing gets tricky. Now we are in the domain of faith and belief – there are no EXTERNAL facts to help us here. Obviously, the person espousing the above belief believes the proposition to be true. He or she also belongs to a community that believes the same proposition. ‘Proof’ is a slippery word in the faith community because the ideas of ‘damnation’ and ‘salvation’ and ‘belief in Jesus Christ’ are subjective – they have no empirical counterparts in the external world. The faithful believe in hell without demanding evidence of hell’s existence. Often they will rely upon the interpretation of authorities in the faith community they belong to (similar to the rationalist’s reliance upon scientific authorities for scientific truths) who in turn derive their authority from a scriptural source accepted as divine and literal truth.

Belief has ancient and deep roots within the human psyche – even when it is false. We do not like questioning our beliefs because they give our lives purpose and meaning; we also fear incurring the wrath of the god of our scriptures by challenging our fundamental religious beliefs to scrutiny. Questioning beliefs is uncomfortable as it forces us to look outside our own tradition and community – it threatens to alienate us from our friends and family.

The answer to the question: Is scriptural truth true? – depends upon whom you ask the question.

The faithful believer: Yes. Absolutely!
The rational skeptic: Please don’t insult my intelligence by asking me to believe in fairytales.

Demanding evidence of the faithful for doctrinal teachings is futile as the faith community often considers such demands irreverent and the validation methods of skeptics, inadequate. Fundamentalist Christians accept without question the world was created in 7 days by a Creator, (because it is said so in the holy book) they lose no sleep over the rationalist community’s complete disregard and derision of such beliefs. There is, thus, no future in trying to ‘educate’ the faithful about the origins of the universe from a scientific standpoint, or determining the exact point at which life is conceived in the womb, or suggesting the world may not have a paternal creator. Similarly, there is no hope of ever convincing the rational types of ‘religious truths’ by repeating creation and afterlife stories written in some holy book. There is just no common ground here.

So, is there any common ground at all? I hope so! We are human. We are born, we die. We think, we feel, we experience the whole gamut of emotions that humans are wont to do. We eat, sleep, defecate and procreate. We suffer, struggle, hate, make love and celebrate. We bleed. We breathe. We dream. There is much that we share.

Our profoundest disagreements are about certain IDEAS: our notions about who we are, where we came from, why we are here, and where we are going – and these ideas define who we are to ourselves and to others. We argue and fight each other over these ideas. We identify with these ideas so intimately we often confuse an idea about reality with reality itself, we believe that without the support of these ideas we would cease to exist, our lives would fall apart, and the world as we know it would collapse!

I want to remind scientists that their domain of inquiry is best suited to the study of exteriors – comets, planets, physical forces, social and technical systems, man-made objects, elements and minerals, human behavior, flora, fauna, the world of nature, brains, atoms, quarks – the external world, both visible and invisible, and the internal parts that constitute the external world – NOT the interior world of consciousness and states of consciousness. What can be observed by the mind (the eye of reason) and the senses (the eye of flesh) is the legitimate domain of science. However, there are valid interior realities – inaccessible to science – that may be observed only through contemplation, the eye of spirit.

I want to reassure the faith community that religious doctrine may be separated from religious experience without having to suffer an ontological breakdown. We have to be careful when we talk about religious experience as it can mean different things to different people in different faith cultures. I want to avoid advocating any form of religiosity that rests on specific a priori beliefs from any religious tradition – the Holy Ghost, Immaculate Conception, salvation, nirvana, karma, reincarnation, bardos, demons, deities, angels and the like. However, there are enough accounts of a contemplation based ‘religious’ experience in all faiths, (and from the faithless as well) with enough shared characteristics, stretching all the way back in time from the present, to warrant a discussion of a common contemplative experience that does NOT require, as pre-conditions, either the acceptance of a religious doctrine or the development of rational thought. Unfortunately, the nature of this experience suffers during expression because every attempt at understanding and articulating the experience is influenced and shaped by religious or cultural ideas as well as individual intellectual maturity. The same Common Contemplative Experience (CCE) may be described using different terms and explanations by a 20th century quantum physicist, a 17th century German shoemaker, a Hindu priest from the 19th century, a philosopher from ancient Greece, a Bengali revolutionary in British India, a 20th century German poet, a 13th century Persian poet, or a 20th century Russian filmmaker. However, I am hopeful about the a posteriori possibility of distilling the essence of the CCE by uncoupling it from the particularities of doctrine and belief as well as ruling out those expressions that arise in the minds of the mentally unstable. By doing so we should be able to provide a universal description of the experience that I call CCE.

On the plus side, common contemplative experience, as opposed to dogma, can be verified in a way that should satisfy the verification-needs of skeptics. Precepts can be studied, injunctions followed, experiential facts apprehended and then validated or rejected by a community of the adequate.

I understand rationalists might well take issue with accepting a community of the adequate made up of just the faithful; however in today’s world it should not be hard to find rationalists within the community of the adequate as long as we restrict the community to those who have seriously practiced some form of contemplation and achieved results that other serious contemplators would recognize as valid. Just being religious or belonging to a particular faith cannot be sufficient qualification for membership in such a community of the adequate.

Finally, the observations I have made about the beliefs of Christian fundamentalists in this article cut across the entire spectrum of religious fundamentalism: Hindu, Jewish, Islamic et. al. The prevalence of dogmatic thinking is not unique to any particular faith. Also, Science can be (and has been) dogmatic too. It is called scientism.