The Trouble with Atheists

The trouble with atheists is that they are fighting a battle with a delusion, which is not that surprising. Atheists pride themselves on their rational, secular intelligence. Atheists can see the patent absurdity of God as a violent, abusive, and controlling patriarch, and the untenability of belief based on blind faith, and so they reject the whole thing. They feel it is foolish to believe in something “just because” and so, they do not. They reject the absurdity and settle into a lifetime commitment to the Church of Secular Humanism.

It is not an unreasonable position to take. However, as a former atheist myself, I would like to say that rejecting the violent and patriarchal Church God is not the same, or shouldn’t be the same, as rejecting human spirituality in toto. As I have learned in almost two decades of research, analysis, and “experience,” there’s something more to human spirituality than what is typically presented to the pews in the churches of the big-name ecclesiastical brands.

Frankly, I’m not the only scholar to say this. Consider that Einstein (Hermanns 1983), several famous physicists (Wilber 2001), not a few psychologists (Arthur Hastings 2010; Maslow 1969; Stace 1960), and a small handful of sociologists have suspected (and even researched) this “something more” for quite some time. Despite what polemicists like Richard Dawkins (2006) would have you believe, there has been a significant amount of reasonable scholarly interest in the “something more” of human spirituality.

If this is true, the immediate question must be, what is the “something more.”

In a word, actually in two words, the answer is “mystical experience,” or what I simply call connection experience. This notion, this idea of mystical connection experience as the “something more” of human spirituality is not something to simply ignore or dismiss. Founding psychologist William James took mystical experience seriously when he called mystics the “pattern-setters” whose experiences established religious traditions (James 1982). Another scholar (Heriot-Maitland, 2008) noted that “mystical experience… constitute[s] the very essence of religion, such that the origin of a given tradition can often be traced to an initial transcendent encounter, moment of revelation, salvation, or enlightenment.” Abraham Maslow, the founding father of humanistic psychology, spent the bulk of his career looking at “peak experiences” (a secular name for secular type mystical experiences). He felt that mystical experience was the “intrinsic core” and essence, the universal nucleus of every known … religion (Maslow, 2012: 339). All these folks say basically the same thing — mystical experience is the foundation of authentic human spirituality.

Moving forward

Is this true? Is mystical connection experience really the root, the authentic core, the essence of human spirituality. Off course, you can believe whatever you want. If you are an atheist and reject all things spiritual, you can continue to erroneously assume that Church God represents the sum total of human spirituality, and not bother with anything else. Or, you can resolve to do what scientists do and that is to look at the facts, which, as scholar William Stace said some decades ago, clearly indicate the reality and significance of mystical experience (Stace 1960).

Whatever you decide to do at this point is up to you. This is a free world, and most people can believe what they want. I will say this though: As someone who has been focused on a sociological and psychological study of human spirituality for over a decade, mystical experience, what I call connection experience, is definitely a far-more-common, far more significant, and far more important thing that we have all been hitherto allowed/led to believe.

Further Reading

• The Ubiquity of Mystical Experiences
• Three Interesting Things that Einstein said about God and Religion
• Einstein and the Poet
• Video — What did Einstein Say about Religion

References

Arthur Hastings. 2010. “William James, Conversion and Rapid, Radical Transformation.” Journal of Consciousness Studies 17(11–12):116–20.

Cari Romm. 2015. “Rethinking One of Psychology’s Most Infamous Experiments.” The Atlantic.

Dawkins, Richard. 2006. The God Delusion. New York: Mariner Books.

Heriot-Maitland, Charles P. 2008. “Mysticism and Madness: Different Aspects of the Same Human Experience?” Mental Health, Religion & Culture 11(3):301–25.

Hermanns, William. 1983. Einstein and the Poet. Boston: Branden Books.

James, William. 1982. The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study of Human Nature. New York: Penguin.

Maslow, A. H. 1969. “The Farther Reaches of Human Nature.” Journal of Transpersonal Psychology 1(1):1–9.

Stace, Walter Terence. 1960. Mysticism and Philosophy. London: Macmillan.

Wilber, Ken. 2001. Quantum Questions: Mystical Writings of the World’s Great Physicists. New York: Shambhala.