Tags
12-step programs, AAR, Augustine, autobiography, conferences, David Hume, drugs, Flying Spaghetti Monster, Lucas Johnston, Mañjuśrī, nonhuman animals, religion, Śāntideva, Sigmund Freud, Thomas Aquinas
My fiancée, who believes in God, once told me that God seems much too distant to pray to. Despite not having any Catholic background, when she feels like praying, she prays to saints. When I was in the running for a good tenure-track job in our area, she prayed to St. Thomas Aquinas, as the patron saint of academics and philosophers, that I would get it. Until that point I don’t think I’d even made the connection between the saints people pray to and actual historical people – I’d only thought of Thomas as a natural law theorist and systematic theologian.
Fast forward: a little while ago, things were a little rough in my home. My fiancée and I tried to adopt a big beautiful black dog, which turned out not to be the right pet for our situation. The dog found a very good home and we’ll be able to get another dog soon enough, but losing the dog was pretty rough on us, especially my fiancée. It didn’t help that it was late winter, when everything was dark and cold, without the novelty of snow’s first arrival or the joys of Christmas. The stress of wedding planning didn’t help either. I was intending to ease some of my fiancée’s distress by planning a surprise party for her approaching milestone birthday. Of course, while the planning was happening, I couldn’t tell her about the party to comfort her; and hiding the event from her was its own source of stress.
It was a hard thing to take. Even though I knew I was doing something that would make her happy in the end, the combination of the secrecy and the present suffering was hard for me to handle emotionally. And so I found myself offering a prayer to Mañjuśrī, the celestial bodhisattva to whom Śāntideva offers his devotion. I prayed, tearfully, for him to give me the strength I needed to help me through my loved one’s suffering. At one point while doing this I wound up calling him Maitreya, because (I admit sheepishly) I sometimes have difficulty remembering the difference between the two.
All this is no small deal for me, because I don’t actually believe in Mañjuśrī or Maitreya, at least not in any standard sense of the term. I don’t think there is actually somebody out there who accumulated enough good karma to become a celestial being who redirects good karma down to the rest of us for our benefit. I don’t even think we get reborn after death.
But in moments like these it becomes clear to me that prayer to some sort of personal higher being is something I need. And I am surely not alone in this. As atheists have become more open and strident in their criticism of theism, one of their favourite memes is the Flying Spaghetti Monster – a made-up joke deity which, they argue, should have as much of a status as any historical religious tradition, since there’s no more reason to believe in any of those.
And yet. A couple years ago the AAR held a panel on the Flying Spaghetti Monster phenomenon, one of the few such panels to catch the media’s eye. Lucas Johnston, a student on the panel, told an anecdote that rightfully caught a lot of attention. As reported in the AP story on the panel: “his neighbor, a militant atheist who sports a pro-Darwin bumper sticker on her car, tried recently to start her car on a dying battery. As she turned the key, she murmured under her breath: ‘Come on, Spaghetti Monster!'”
Was she joking or being ironic? To some extent perhaps – but clearly she really wanted her car to start, felt a need to say something. And it seems to me that when facing difficult times, most people feel a need to pray to something, even if they don’t think there’s any real entity they can pray to.
Why is this? Freud thought that “religion” was all about the personification of nature: we have learned to treat nature, which we have no influence over, like the fellow human beings we do have some influence on. I wouldn’t be surprised if this were accurate as a historical account of belief in higher beings (which, let’s not forget, is far from exhausting the concept of “religion” as it is usually used.) But there’s something further and deeper going on here as well – something I think Augustine really grasped. We human beings will never be as good as we want to be, let alone having all the things we want. We need help, we are dependent – but the people we depend on, our community, are often not there for us. We need a being to turn to. For Augustine this was really convenient, since he believed that life was all about turning to such a being. And yet, experience seems to testify that even if there are no higher beings, it is still necessary to invent them. David Hume’s Natural History of Religion claimed that science would lead us to belief in a distant deist God, a First Cause, but also noted that most “religion” had nothing to do with this – rather, it was a belief in actively intervening beings like saints or celestial bodhisattvas, whose existence was completely unsupported scientifically.
Hume dismissed such “superstitious” beliefs, saw them as being of value only to the uninformed. But there are good reasons for their endurance, well beyond misinformation. The Alcoholics Anonymous program has proved to be one of the most successful ways of dealing with alcohol addiction, and their “12-step” method has transferred successfully to treating many other kinds of addictions, not only to substances. The heart of the method is admitting one’s own helplessness and putting oneself in the hands of God, or some sort of trusted Godlike being – Mañjuśrī would do the trick. Relying on oneself doesn’t work, because oneself caused the problem; nor can one rely on the people around one, who work in the same established patterns in which the problem developed. It’s a very Augustinian method: one relies on grace and faith, not on works.
So the question is, what do we moderns do about this matter? If we are not convinced that gods exist, or if the God we believe in is an abstract First Explanation (let alone a First Cause) that doesn’t answer prayers, is there any appropriate way to satisfy our need for prayer in hard times?
Very interesting post.
While I joked about the idea of God finding one’s lost car keys a thread or two ago, I pray for things like that all the time. Many of my prayers start with, “Dear Jesus…” even though I don’t literally think Jesus or anyone else is listening. Recently my wife found much comfort when I and my father (an evangelical minister) prayed that her prelims would go well, even though she didn’t literally believe God would help her.
One of my regrets is when a loved one dying of cancer asked for my prayers, I told her that she would be in my thoughts. At the time I was just coming to terms with my unbelief, and felt it would be unethical to lie to her. Now my definition of prayer has evolved such that literal belief is not necessary for me to call something, “prayer.”
Interesting thoughts. What then would you say your definition of prayer is?
Yes, prayer may be a certain force in itself, independently of one/One listening to it. One feels better and this can have some benefits on the people around us and possibly also on the events, insofar as these also depend on people (if one prays and hence relaxes while desperately looking for one’s keys, one is more likely to remember where s/he put them).
Still, I guess your loved person was not asking YOU to pray, but rather asking you to pray GOD for her.
I agree, prayer can have real and efficacious benefits. To me the question would then be: should one replace prayer with some similar activity intended to relax oneself, that does not rely on supernatural beings? Or should one continue to act as if one endorses beliefs one considers to be false?
Is not prayer (just like fasting, pilgrimage, alms…) a kind of s?dhana (spiritual practice) which *can* be embedded in a religion but exists before a formalised religion? One finds prayer in no matter which religion, even in Theravāda. In sum, I would not ask whether it is legitimate to take *belief* in Mañju?r? away from prayer. Rather, prayer pre-exists specific beliefs, which are added to it.
What does it mean to say prayer “exists before a formalized religion”? It may be that there is an evolved need for it, an instinct for it. But that can still be a matter of error: we evolve to see the world as flat. It is possible that belief in higher beings is the same way. I’m not aware of any prayer that is just prayer; prayer is always prayer to something. Just as one never just conducts a pilgrimage, but always goes on pilgrimage to a place, on the understanding that there is something particularly worthy about that place. (Nobody makes a pilgrimage to their own coffee table.) If there exists no entity worthy of being prayed to, it seems to me there’s a problem with prayer.
Amod – I think it’s interesting that your personal story on prayer relates a time when you asked for strength in dealing with a situation, especially for strength or help in a relationship.
I most commonly pray to ask for help – and almost always for help to be a better father.
Whether or not the prayer “is answered” is somewhat irrelevant – I find that the act of humbling myself to a point where I’m examining a problem and finding that the root cause is a shortcoming in me is liberating. Humility is liberating. Then the act of humbly asking for help, I think, opens me up to receiving help where before my pride blocked me.
Whom do I pray to? I don’t know. I’m not a believer in an anthropomorphic deity. I think there’s a higher power. I think there’s a force behind life. I think there’s some kind of energy connecting us all. I practice Christianity because I think there are a lot of good ideas in there and it provides a moral framework for my children. When I pray I try to open myself up to the world beyond the space I personally occupy because I think the essence of a spiritual life is rooted in having connections.
I think “the modern” wants just as many answers as “the primitive” did, and just as much consoling, when the world gets hard to understand and scary. So I think the way is to open yourself up to the fact that the universe is a larger place than just yourself, and find your solace and support from those around you.
Unplugging from your i-whatever is a pre-requisite to that of course…
Glad I stumbled across your blog. I was just mentioning to your fiancee that I wished I had an opportunity to get to know you better and I may have found it. Funny how those connections work.
– JT
Thanks, JT, and glad to see you around. I’d probably agree with a lot in your answer, and am conflicted with how it fits together. I agree with the idea that prayer involves humility and asking for help – that is how I see it too, in cases like those I’ve described here. I don’t feel the need to pray for a good job, however badly I might want one.
I don’t have a hard time believing in some sort of abstract higher power, a truth underlying the universe (“Truth is God,” said Gandhi). But such a being often seems too abstract to pray to. I doubt that it can answer prayers; although you’re right to question whether a prayer needs to be answered. Perhaps more important, though, is whether the object of the prayer even listens. That may be the sticking point for me – the idea of a prayer seems to imply some sort of person, some sort of fellow subject that knows, that understands.
The Advaita Vedānta tradition in India identifies the cosmic truth with subjectivity and consciousness themselves, the ability to perceive perception that all thinking beings have. From an Advaita perspective, I suppose, prayer is prayer to oneself – but a higher, universal, cosmic self we all share, rather than one’s own individual and limited self. Such a cosmic self actually could listen (though it wouldn’t really answer), because perceiving and listening are its nature. I might be able to buy that. Will need to think on this more.
The 12 step programme is powerful because it cuts through the double-bind of having to be strong whilst at the same time knowing that you are utterly helpless before your substance of choice. So you let go and ‘let God’. Is this just a metaphysical strategy corresponding to the Jamesian leap of faith? Will it work if your ‘ishta devata’ (chosen form of divinity) is the FSM? I think that in extremis the average individual will cling to the conventional and choose to implore the aid of the more exalted divinities that have the sanction of centuries of worship. FSM, Santosh-ma and Sterculus are specialists, what we need to put our lives in order is a good generalist. Note that prayer in the Catholic tradition to individual saints that are associated with particular problems are prayers of intercession.
The appropriate attitude to prayer for the non-believer? Being helpless before the need to pray and knowing that it is senseless is a double-bind that only Bertrand Russell interceding with David Hume is efficacious in relieving.
The points about generalists and specialists are interesting, Michael. I wonder whether the generalist is just too remote. It seems too far away for the Muslims who do their prayer and worship at the tombs of Sufi saints – but then there are plenty of conservative Muslims who see an abstract, universal God as satisfying their prayers just fine. Some people seem to manage with that.
I suppose part of the problem with the FSM would be a problem with any deity that is made up by us or people like us: such a deity no longer really takes us beyond ourselves. The whole point with prayer seems to be humility, bowing before something bigger than one’s own small self; one can’t do that if the object of one’s bowing comes out of one’s own small self.
Amod:
I think that the idea of all prayer being prayer of intercession is that we pray to the saint to intercede with God on our behalf. The saint may be a more intelligible focus for the believer, less remote than the abstract deity. The power of God as manifesting in a particular way is linked to the saint’s biography thus Aquinas and Clare (patron saint of television and media)
from
http://wapedia.mobi/en/Intercession_of_saints
Amod,
the essential thing about prayer, it seems to me, is that it is irreducibly emic. You can’t understand it from the outside. You can offer a sociological or anthropological account of it, or even a liturgiological account, but to really know what prayer is like, you just have to pray.
How would you distinguish your stance outlined here (“stance” may be too strong a term) from Dennett’s account of “belief in belief”– i.e., the claim (which D. of course critiques, but claims to find widespread) that it is somehow therapeutic to have a kind of faith in something despite knowing it is ultimately unjustifiable?
It’s a good question. On this matter, I’m not sure that my account does differ from Dennett’s at all.
You may be on to something about prayer being irreducibly emic. I was noting one of Bob Orsi’s informants making this exact claim in his Between Heaven and Earth. Such a position does seem to suggest an externalist account of truth. For if there are indeed truths that are irreducibly emic and can only be known through direct experience, then if there are people incapable of having such an experience (which is at least theoretically possible) then they are truths despite the fact that some people cannot know them.
The point interests me in particular because in your comment to that post you had a more internalist-seeming take on ethical justification, saying that what we need to do is notice the reasons we already have. This isn’t to say you’re contradicting yourself – I don’t think you are, not necessarily – but just to notice an interesting tension.
Took me a bit to grasp –if I have grasped it– what you meant about the tension. I think I provisionally agree, but I would have said that an irreducibly emic experience lends just as much support to the internalist case, in the sense that the emic experience is always an intentional object (“intentional” as Husserl or Brentano would use it); i.e., it exists only “for” someone, not “by itself.”
As to ethical justification, I would say that “noticing the reasons we already have” is simply the first step. I do incline to think that the internalist/externalist debate ends, from a “God’s-eye-view,” in a tie, or an Aufhebung, which is of course not quite the same thing.
Yes, I think I’d agree with most if not all of this. Ultimately, I suspect we need to put the internalist and externalist views together. The question is how, and it’s far from easily answered.
Pingback: Consequentialism and lying to oneself | Love of All Wisdom
Amod:
I think that the idea of all prayer being prayer of intercession is that we pray to the saint to intercede with God on our behalf. The saint may be a more intelligible focus for the believer, less remote than the abstract deity. The power of God as manifesting in a particular way is linked to the saint’s biography thus Aquinas and Clare (patron saint of television and media)
(from Wapedia on Intercession of Saints)
Good point – I didn’t say much about the way Catholics and Muslims have made room for prayer to saints. I’m not sure how much that helps from a constructive perspective, though. I don’t believe in a conscious God who decides the course of worldly events; and these theories of saints’ intercession seem to depend on such a God.
Concerning praying,
rather than ask:
“who is the one we are praying to?”
perhaps we should first ask:
“who is praying?”
When we are looking for answers
we must exhaust every direction, mustn’t we?
We distinguish between the one who prays and the one prayed to.
We model this after our everyday experience
of the one who speaks and the one spoken to.
When we socially interact,
we see the one we speak to, don’t we? (most of the time, anyways)
Yet, before we approach the bigger mystery
of someone being prayed to, someone external to us whose existence is in question,
perhaps we should look more closely
at the closer mystery of our own existence first
If we haven’t answered that question
then how can we answer the other one?
Build upon certainty.
Is our own existence itself not a mystery?
Does it seem a tad strange or out of priority
to ask of the “existence” of that being prayed to
when we don’t even understand
our own existence?
However, if we are to put the focus of the question
on “that prayed to”
then we must already already believe
that we know who we are, isn’t it?
So then, let me ask
“Who are you?”
When your own mind
searchs for itself
where does one find
where you are?
You may reply:
“I am in my brain”
but that is just a concept you’ve been told,
isn’t it?
What I ask is:
“Who are YOU”
where is this experience that you intimately know
yourself to be
that you’ve intimately known your entire life
that you know without a single doubt
exists
Take away all the knowledge
that you’ve ever learned
from books, school, university
TV, shows, lectures, talks, other people
and ask yourself
“Who am I?”
Where do you reside?
In your arms?,
your legs?
your head?
Are we REAL
or are we just another concept
that our brilliantly creative conceptual minds
have created?
We live our lives in a conceptual world,
a conceptual bubble
All these words
on all these blogs
are part of the conceptual bubble
Can we imagine our own life
outside of the conceptual bubble?
What would life be like
outside this all pervasive
conceptual bubble?
Perhaps the answers to our questions
that we pose within the conceptual bubble
lie outside of it
If you search for yourself
where can this quality called “you” be found?
I leave you with the question
Interesting and important thoughts, Gian. Indeed, perhaps the answers posed within concepts lie outside of concepts – or perhaps they lie indeed within the concepts. It’s very hard to tell, and many have struggled with the point.
On this particular issue, as I noted to JT above, I am beginning to wonder more about the Advaita Vedānta view, that ultimately the world described by concepts is illusory and we are all really a single cosmic subjectivity – which can indeed listen to prayers, if not answer them. I think you are right that one must examine the nature of the one praying as well as the one being prayed to. Still not sure what the result of that examination will be.
There is no weighty problem here. Prayer is a great comfort to people in mourning, facing death, and other issues in life. Simply respect their needs, bow your head with them. Stand, respect their views, Keep your own views to yourself.
If you think you are lying to yourself, you have no respect for other’s beliefs.
There’s a difference between respecting others’ beliefs and respecting one’s own. The latter is what I’m particularly concerned with here.
Great post. What I want to say has already been mentioned in one of the comments above, but I’ll say it again, then attempt a direct reply to the question at the end of your post. One of the great comforts of prayer is the humble attitude that we adopt when we pray. Another is that in praying we are moving closer to an optimistic standpoint, at least insofar as asking for help implies believing in the possibility that things can get better. Now, you ask whether prayer can be justified for non-believers. I think it can, if it is construed as adopting a standpoint. We don’t need to believe in the existence of benevolent and mindful gods in order to adopt that attitude without inconsistency. I think that kind of prayer is a bit like talking to one’s dead grandmother, or to some fictional character: we don’t really believe that they’re out there, let alone that they’re listening, but we find that in addressing them we can easier adopt a kind of attitude that we find valuable. So, it’s not the god or the saint who is worth praying to, but it’s the attitude worth adopting.
This may be a blasphemous view of prayer, but it is, as far as I can see, a way to defend praying non-believers against objections of inconsistency.
Hi Maria – good points. I think you are right with the comparisons, right to point out that prayer encourages an appropriately humble and grateful state of character. My worry, I guess, is that by linking that developing state of character to false beliefs, prayer under such circumstances (and perhaps talking to one’s dead grandmother as well, assuming one doesn’t believe she can hear) is a form of lying to oneself – and therefore in that respect developing a worse, more dishonest or credulous, character. Do we want to be the kind of person who acts as if fictional characters are real, as if the dead can hear the living? Is such a person really better? It might seem to make a virtue out of delusion.
The problems here are knotty and I don’t think I’ve resolved them; I’ve tried to explore them in several subsequent posts. Here and here I tried to argue that one should not believe false things, because truth has a value independent of good consequences it may bring. But I had second thoughts here, concerned that it’s possible to overemphasize truth.
Hi Amod. Yes, I’ve been following your blog and I know the kind of problems you’re concerned with. Went through the posts you linked to in your reply once more,and here’s how I reconstruct your train of thought: prayer (for non-believers), consequentialism (Railton’s brand of it), and some varieties of ‘stay positive’ thinking all imply believing something one knows isn’t true. From here there are two options: either reject these views/practices/attitudes altogether, or justify them by arguing that truth doesn’t have an overriding importance. Now let’s rewind a little and revisit the question of whether prayer, consequentialism, and positive thinking really imply believing in what we know is false. I think you’re right about consequentialism there, but I’m not convinced about prayer and positive thinking.
You ask: ‘Do we want to be the kind of person who acts as if fictional characters are real, as if the dead can hear the living? Is such a person really better? It might seem to make a virtue out of delusion.’ But does a praying non-believer act as if gods exist? Does someone who talks to their dead grandmother have to believe that she’s out there, listening? I’m trying to identify a false belief here, and I can’t find it. I mean, there’s a difference between these kind of practices and, I don’t know, writing to Santa, isn’t there? I guess I’m trying to say that not all prayer is an ‘as if’ practice, similarly to talking to the dead or to fictional characters. There is no delusion here, as far as I can see. We don’t act as if there are gods; we choose to adopt a standpoint (humility and gratitude), and prayer is something that facilitates it.
You seem to be offering a consequentialist argument against prayer: that it may have the undesirable consequence of developing a credulous character. I think this is a slippery slope. It all depends on whether we can find a model of prayer for non-believers which doesn’t actually involve making assumptions we know are false. And I think there is such a model. We’d have to do some phenomenology here, to describe it in more detail.
Aha. Thanks for the clarification. Now I think I understand your point a lot better, and it’s a really interesting one: you’re questioning whether someone talking to her dead grandmother is really acting “as if” the grandmother can hear her. I’ve assumed that she is, in everything I’ve said above including my response to you, but you’re saying now that she isn’t. This is an objection I hadn’t really thought about, and I think it is worth pushing further.
I think the point might hinge on the question of whether there are such things as implicit or unconscious beliefs at all, and how we can know there are. I think there are, and I’m trying to write another post defending the point. But on the specific matter of prayer, perhaps it’s best to narrow it down for the moment: as I said to Elisa above, prayer is always prayer to something. One does not merely bow down in the hopes of becoming humble and grateful; one bows down to something, Mañju?r?, the saint or whatever.
The question is then, what ontological status does the object of prayer have? What is it that we’re praying to? If we’re not implying with our actions that we’re praying to a nonexistent being, then what are we praying to instead? Some higher element of ourselves perhaps?
Amod,
you ask a bunch of good but tough questions at the end of your comment. If I had to make a pick from all the options you’ve laid out, I’d say we pray to a higher element of ourselves. as I wrote at the end of my previous reply to you, we’d have to describe the phenomenon of prayer in more detail in order to get closer to an answer. I can’t be of much help here because I don’t actually pray, though I sympathize with praying non-believers.
If I understand you correctly, your worry is that praying contains an unconscious belief, namely the belief in the existence of gods. Of course, my own assumption is that praying need not imply such a belief. I’m a bit insecure here, not being well read in philosophy of language, but couldn’t we construe prayer without belief as an act of speech which has a purpose different from addressing an actual entity? It’s perfectly alright (it seems to me) to speak/write addressing someone without intending it as an actual address. Like writing letters that one knows will never be sent. Some of us write letters without even hoping that they will be read by the addressee. We address a person, alive or dead, doesn’t matter, but the point of writing isn’t to convey something to the addressee. Not sure I can explain what exactly the purpose is, but in doing that we look to adopt a certain standpoint. This isn’t an ‘as if’ practice, because we’re perfectly aware of what we do not intend. In fact, if we were to write ‘as if’ the addressee is still around and intercepting, we’d write much differently.
Now, coming closer to the topic, in the case of unsent letters it’s irrelevant whether the addressee is real or imaginary, dead or alive. Those letters aren’t meant as addresses, although they are so formulated. (Of course, you might retort that this, too, is irrational..I’m actually curious to know what you think of this). My hunch is that prayer in the absence of belief is kinda like this: an address in form but not in intention.
We could, I suppose, press the point saying that the praying non-believer has an unconscious belief, but why would we do that if s/he can tell a plausible story about praying without belief? That would be uncharitable.
Again, you’re right that answering the question would require exploring the phenomenon of prayer in more detail. The big issue for me is the “intentional object” of prayer, the fact that prayer is to something. If it’s really a prayer to a higher element of ourselves, why don’t we address it to ourselves instead of to Manjusri or St. Jude? The same seems true of letters that one doesn’t intend to send: why are we addressing it to the other in form, if we’re not doing so in intention?
Other related phenomenon: I often find myself arguing “in my head” with my ex-wife, though I haven’t seen her in years. I wonder what that involves. Is it that on some level I hope to see her again and say these things to her someday (despite knowing full well that it wouldn’t solve any problems, and not consciously intending to do so)? I guess when I think about it, a lot of it involves clarifying matters in my own mind, perhaps thinking about how I might react in similar situations in the future.
And then… I start to think about Martha Nussbaum’s writings on fiction, that imagining others’ lives (including, or even especially, people who never really existed) helps us think through our own ethics and live more ethically ourselves. Fiction is in some sense a lie, but only a Gradgrind (or perhaps a Plato or Augustine…?) would say that therefore we should never tell stories. Maybe that is the best way of thinking about prayer: as an ethically productive work of fiction. Perhaps especially useful with saints or celestial bodhisattvas: for these are fictional human or once-human characters whom we admire, people whose qualities we hope to have and do not. (At least, they are fictional to the extent we imagine them answering prayers.) We don’t believe that fictional characters are real even when we say they are real while we tell the story. Technically, I suppose, we are acting “as if” they are real, but that doesn’t have to imply an unconscious belief in their reality, nor a lie to ourselves or others – at least, not if we’re careful to make the distinction.
Thank you. I think this exchange has helped me clear up a lot of things in my mind.
The difference between Buddhist and Christian prayer is that a Buddhist, at the end of the visualization, invariably either dissolves the object of the visualization into himself or dissolves himself into the visualization.
Your question — why not pray to oneself — is a good one. However, in a world where the self has no more solid existence than other, why would that be more sensible? And we are so much in the habit of visualizing the self, that it makes some sense to pray to a front visualization. It also feels more right. It opens the heart more. that’s my take on it.
Thanks, Jim. I tend myself not to buy the idea that self and other are nondifferent, but it’s worth pointing out that if one does, this distinction might be less important. (Though one must be cautious with collapsing distinctions: it’s unlikely to be a good idea to pray to Mara.)
Pingback: Truth and importance | Love of All Wisdom
Pingback: Trusting in man, trusting in God | Love of All Wisdom